Journal

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

First day cycling in to the office in weeks, because of all the recent travel. Fairly icy wind in my face for much of the journey and, partly because I was carrying a fair amount of weight in my panniers, when I got in my legs kept wanting to give way. Still, a busy day soon took my mind of my gelatinous appendages. Starts with a call to Jeanne-Marie Gescher in China and then mutates into work on presentations for Washington, D.C., next week.

Then, around lunchtime, I head off for Old Street area, to Forum for the Future (www.forumforthefuture.org.uk). They have just celebrated their tenth anniversary and – like us – are in the throes of a strategic review. I had been asked by Peter Madden, FFF’s relatively new Chief Executive, to do a ‘provocation’ for their team, with their Cheltenham crew linked in by video. I found it a fascinating session, with considerable similarities between our teams – though we have generally tried to suppress growth, whereas they have been a little more inclined to embrace it. Turns out that our two organisations face many of the same challenges – and we end with an agreement to organise further exchanges.

Sunday, February 26, 2006

DAVID HALL & THOUGHTS OF POLITICS

Yesterday’s Times carried an obituary for David Hall, who I first met at the beginning of the 1970s, when I was getting into the town planning area at the UCL School of Environmental Studies – and he was with the Environmental Education Unit, publishers of the Bulletin of Environmental Education (BEE). But I knew him better through the Town & Country Planning Association (TCPA), where he had been a director since 1967. He went on to higher things in planning, while I got the hell out.

But the roll call of names mentioned in the obituary brought back those years in full force, people like Colin Buchanan, Derek Diamond, Michael Dower, Peter Hall, Desmond Heap, Peter Self – and, David’s chairman at the TCPA, Maurice Ash. And thinking about Maurice brought back a memory from later in the 1970s, when he co-hosted a dinner with author Gordon Rattray-Taylor (for whom Elaine had agreed to do some reseach for a book, but where I ended up doing the work because she found Rattray-Taylor difficult). I was then still working with John Roberts’ TEST and can’t quite remember why I was invited, though it may have been because of my writing at the time for New Scientist. In any event, the dinner was called to begin developing what eventually became The Green Alliance, designed to bring green thinking into the world of politics.

Though I did a ‘political salon’ on Wednesday evening this week in Portcullis House, Westminster, I have long avoided politics wherever possible, preferring the worlds of markets, business, science and technology instead. But increasingly I feel that we will need to plunge into politics if we are to keep the momentum going in the business world.

And that’s happening at the moment. Sam (Lakha) and I have been up to our eyeballs with many things recently, among them a campaign to dissuade the Chancellor of the Exchequer to do some sort of U-turn. On Friday, I was part of a lunch hosted by Raj Thamotheram of the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), bringing together a number of people who have been working to stall Gordon Brown’s efforts to push corporate reporting back into the Stone Age – with his ill-judged, more-or-less-off-the-cuff decision to throw the CBI a bone by dropping the already-legislated Operating & Financial Review (OFR) requirement for large UK listed companies. A rather different set of actors from those who gathered to conceive The Green Alliance, but something of the same spirit.

I’m not a natural for smoke-filled rooms, or their smoke-free modern equivalents, but I think many of us were both shaken and stirred by the OFR misstep. And now, having never voted )or even contemplated voting) Conservative in my life, it’s amazing how the combination of some intelligent policy proposals for our issues from David Cameron, the new Tory leader, the intensifying stumbles of the current Government, and the extraordinary implosion of the Lib Dems into sleaze begins to divert one’s political thinking into alternative channels …

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Fascinating day, where in addition to a very stimulating session with Sophia (Tickell) on SustainAbility’s evolving work in the area of social entrepreneurship, I had lunch with John May (who I first knew of in the 1970s, when Elaine was working at Wildwood House and John was working with Wildwood on The Index of Possibilities) and then, later in the day, a phone call with Dr Robert Grubbs. He is the Nobel Prize-winning chemist from Caltech who I share a Cleantech Venture Forum platform with in San Francisco in March (http://cleantech.com/documents/SF%20Forum%20IX%20Agenda%202%2015%2006.pdf). Given that I gave up chemistry, against all the advice of my long-suffering school, at age 14, we potentially made an ill-matched pair, but the conversation was great fun and highly informative. He and John could be at completely different ends of the sustainability spectrum, an extreme specialist versus a generalist, but both – from their very different perspectives – are zeroing in on sustainable technology. John blogs at The Generalist (http://hqinfo.blogspot.com/).

Saturday, February 18, 2006

Hania came home this evening and we watched George Clooney’s film Good Night, and Good Luck (www.clooneystudio.com/goodnightandgoodluck.html). Set during the early days of broadcast journalism in 1950s America, the film chronicles the conflict between television newsman Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Brilliantly shot, with the sumptuous black and white cinematography reminiscent of that seen in films like Key Largo, released the year before I was born (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040506/).

The storyline revolves around the very public feud that develops when the Senator responds by accusing the anchor – Murrow – of being a communist. The acting is brilliant and the drama intense, but to my mind the film doesn’t really capture the intensity of the climate of fear that developed during the era of McCarthyism, a period when Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall (stars of Key Largo), among others, took extraordinarily brave stands against McCarthy.

That said, I can see the film doing well, because it underscores the paranoia and self-defeatingly vindictive mind-set of the current Bush regime – and appeals to the Hollywood sense of the media saving the world. And it underscores the dangers of allowing the fearful and narrow minded to redefine the meaning and rules of democracy.

Friday, February 17, 2006

Part of me was still spooling in across the Atlantic, having arrived back from Toronto this morning, but we had been invited out tonight by Steve and Sandar Warshal – to The Gate vegetarian restaurant in Hammersmith, and then on to see The Counterfeit Stones (www.counterfeitstones.net) at the Riverside Theatre.

Had no idea what to expect, having never seen the band, The Bootleg Beatles or anyone else of that ilk, but like the rest of the capacity audience I soon found myself doing at least three things simultaneously: (1) jigging up and down energetically, even if not quite getting to the point of dancing down at the front; (2) appreciating how well the Counterfeits have learned to mimic The Stones; and (3) recognising what a truly great band The Stones have been, even if it’s hard to remember much original that they have done in the past 20 years. Though I’m now addicted to the Ronnie-Keef axis, this show reminded us – despite all we now know about what a bugger he could be – how crucial Brian Jones was to the early music and look, with his multi-instrumentalism, his exotic taste in chemicals and, above all else, his beautiful hair.

The Stones make it into my as-if-Desert-Island-Discs (see http://johnelkington.com/inf-music.htm), with Jumpin’ Jack Flash – whose opening chords were playing on the cafe jukebox in 1968 when I was first introduced to Elaine by Frankie Crowe.

Thursday, February 16, 2006

Warned last night that Peterborough was due for an intense ice storm last night and impassable conditions this morning, I was delighted to find the town car waiting at 08.45 and, while the snow meant that the journey back to Toronto, York University and the Schulich School of Business took two hours rather than the normal hour-and-a-half, we managed to tuck in comfortably behind a convoy of eight snowplows bombing along at a quite considerable rate, given the conditions.

Spent the bulk of the day with a longstanding friend and colleague, David Wheeler, who these days is Director and Erivan K Haub Professor in Business and Sustainability at the Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto. In parallel, he is the Founding Director of the York Institute for Research and Innovation in Sustainability – a strategic initiative of York University embracing all ten faculties (http://www.sustainableenterprise.com/people/davidwheeler.html). Also a member of SustainAbility’s Council. Met a wide range of his colleagues and students, and did an invigorating afternoon session with a cross-section of the Faculty and MBA/PhD students, in which I presented our thinking and work. Great fun – and highly stimulating. Indeed, after a period of many years where I found surprisingly little of interest in much of the university world, a bunch of schools are coming on like gangbusters – with Schulich very much in the forefront.

Heading south

One of the snowplows near Toronto, where it was thawing already

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Early this morning, I ducked across by cab to Peterborough’s Canoe Museum (www.canoemuseum.net). Created by Kirk Wipper, this is the largest collection of canoes, kayaks, paddles and related artifacts in the world. Taxi driver who took me hadn’t been, taxi driver who collected me hadn’t been, and nor had a number of other people I talked to during the day. What a treasure they’re missing! Few things are closer to the Canadian soul than the canoe – and I have always adored both canoes and kayaks, as much as anything else as objects of design, as sculpture. Wonderful example of beautiful forms following functions. Among the books I bought: The Canoe: A Living Tradition, by John Jennings, and Algonquians, Hurons and Iroquois: Champlain Explores America, 1603-1616, by Samuel de Champlain.

Had to go around at some speed, because of other commitments, but this really is one of the most rewarding museums I have been to. And the links to the opening up of the country are made very clear with exhibits on the portage era. When opening up my Tapscott-Lopes Lecture this evening, I noted that it’s all-too-easy to think that the current generation of environmentalists invented environmentalism, yet even a few moments in this museum underscores the fact that there were environmentalists and conservationists of extraordinary stature way before the Boomers came along.

I also said that, for an environmentalist, I have always had a peculiarly developed taste for technology, partly because of an early fetish with 1930s and 1940s aircraft, but also partly because of areas I have got involved in like renewable energy and biotechnology. Thankfully, at least in my case, canoeism and kayakism is the technology fetish that dares speak its name. But I also noted that it – if you see humanity as a disease of trees, as we have been described at least once – then you could view canoes as a key vector that carried that disease into a new world. That said, the uses of wood here are enough to persuade at least some trees that the sacrifice was worth it.

Photo: Bill McLennan

The museum was a wonderful reminder, too, of one of my favourite sculptures, The Sprit of Haida Gwaii, an 18-foot cast bronze sculpture by Bill Reid featuring an extraordinary cast of mythical animal and human figures busily paddling – or being borne along in – a dugout canoe (http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/can-am/washington/services/haida-en.asp). Have spent ages hovering around it in Vancouver airport at various times.

Flew in from Miami, as the Beatles once put it, yesterday. Not BOAC, but American Airlines. From the Bahamas to Toronto was an interesting climatic jump, with the snow increasingly apparent for the last leg of the flight. Then followed by an hour-and-a-half town car ride out through the burbs and then through darkening woodscapes to Peterborough. Fascinating day today at Trent University (http://www.trentu.ca/), founded in 1964, motto ‘The World Belongs to Those Who Understand It,’ where I give the annual Tapscott-Lopes Business and Society Lecture this evening. Earlier in the day, I did a lunch with Faculty, then a 2-hour afternoon session with a broad spectrum of students and some Faculty members.

The first Don Tapscott-Ana Lopes Business and Society Lecture in 2003 featured Don, speaking on ‘Integrity and Trust in a Transparent World,’ based on his book The Naked Corporation. The book explains how the new era of transparency has caused a power shift toward customers, employees, shareholders, and other stakeholders. Although I had spoken to Don (http://newparadigm.com/) by phone in the past, this was the first time I had met him and his partner, Ana Lopes.

She is a member of Trent’s Board of Governors and in 1995 founded a communications company to help clients reposition their companies in the digital economy. Ana was Premier Bob Rae’s Executive Assistant from 1992 to 1995 and, as a leader in Toronto’s Portuguese-speaking community, helped to found Abrigo – a counselling service for women and children, and a shelter for women from across the city’s immigrant communities.

Saturday, February 11, 2006

PIRATES, WRECKERS AND SPONGERS

Spent much of the morning ambling around Freeport, where we find ourselves at the ‘Our Lucaya Beach & Golf Resort’ – because that’s where the BIFMA International (www.bifma.org) conference was held and it was easier for me to stay over and write ahead of a trip to Toronto on Tuesday, rather than flying back to London. This afternoon I also spent much of the time reading, inside or in the sun on the beach. One of the books I read was Paul Albury’s The Story of the Bahamas (Macmillan Education 1975), which cast that ‘Our Lucaya’ tag in a very different light. The native Lucayans – who were, by all accounts, an attractive, healthy, welcoming people – were pretty much wiped out by the incoming Spaniards, who used them for slaves. Eventually the Spaniards turned to African slaves, arguing that they were worth 4 or 5 Lucayans, but by then an entire race was extinct.

When the Spaniards first arrived in Haiti, which is where the Lucayans are thought to have originated from, there were perhaps 300,000 Tainos. Sixteen years later, only 16,000 were still living. By 1550, there were thought to be less than 500. Today there are none. Believing that the Spaniards were from another world, many Lucayans were easily lured aboard the slaving ships with promises that they would see their relatives in heaven.

The book is also a rich mine of interesting stories about piracy, wrecking and the sponge industry. The best known pirate was probably the infamous Edward Teach, or ‘Blackbeard’, though the region was also home to women pirates who managed to grab their fair share of notoriety – among them Anne Bonney and Mary Read. Another period of the area’s history I remember reading about in the early 1960s was the blockade-running ventures of the US Civil War and the rum-running of the Prohibiton era. Indeed, as we flew in from Nassau, it was hard not to see many of our co-passengers as today’s equivalents of rum-runners. A sense of concealed menace, of dark undercurrents running beneath the brightly lit, cocooned world of the tourist.

Because Elaine’s father was raised in Barbados, we have long taken an interest in this part of the world. And sponges were another link, featuring heavily, soggily in the bathscapes of our early years. Like many other industries on these islands, the spongers had periods of fantastic profitability, but then overtaxed their natural resource – and, though they later learned to farm sponges to some degree, industrially made alternatives were soon ousting the natural products. I was always fascinated that the sponges we used as children were once living animals. Among the types of sponge traded from the Bahamas, apparently, were the wool, velvet, reef, hardhead, yellow and grass varieties. The names conjure up one of many worlds that once existed here – and which have been largely forgotten in the rush to quarry the latest resource, tourism.

As we walked around Freeport, we saw evidence of a more recent industry, big game – or deep sea – fishing. Many of the boats moored in the harbour were obviously designed to go after fish like the marlin, increasingly endangered, and it was hard not to see them as killing machines in the process of doing themselves – and their owners – out of a future. Their fishing chairs (photos below), from which the wealthy catch big fish with the aid of technology that would have been unimaginable for the likes of Ernest Hemingway, reminded me of electric chairs. But maybe that was just wishful thinking?

Coconut palm

Local flora

Elaine and local flora

Reflection of moorings

High tech sharks

Their precursors

Fishing chair 1

Fishing chair 2

Friday, February 10, 2006

Lunch today was on the beach, the tables and chairs sinking into the white sand, and with a fair old trade wind blowing. You had to hold your salad on your plate to stop it ending up in Cuba. Under heavy cloud, and with a man trying to take off on a parasail and bouncing across the stacked chairs and tables, we found ourselves sitting opposite one of the two main speakers for the afternoon, John Perry Barlow. Had known of him (http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/) for years, particularly as a lyricist for The Grateful Dead, as a long-time contributor to Wired magazine, which I used to adore, and as co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org/), which campaigns for free speech in cyberspace. But had never met him. Turned out we had a shared interest in comparative religion, among other arcane subjects, and things took off from there.

He was probably a bit of a shock for the audience, though he soon had my brain geysering. One of his early observations was that when he is living in the Chinatown area of New York, one of the bars nearby is home to a large mobster or enforcer type who has a “genius” son. So every time John turns up, the guy brings out his son, and the question the boy asked John about furniture was something along the lines of: “What would chairs look like if our legs bent the other way?”

Like the Indian industrialists I met there a few weeks back, Barlow hates government with a will – as do many folk from where he lives, Wyoming. And the feeling is mutual, as his blog (http://blog.barlowfriendz.net/) underscores, particularly his post-Burning Man experiences last year (http://barlow.typepad.com/barlowfriendz/2004/12/a_taste_of_the_.html). But when it comes to multinational corporations, he’s a little more conflicted in terms of government’s role. Viewing them as a higher form of human life, but one with an enormous stake in the next two quarters, not in the future, he sees they need regulating and reining in.

One of the issues he talked about – and it had some of the audience shifting in their seats – was intellectual property, a term he described as an oxymoron. He noted that The Grateful Dead had been early entrants into the open source and content-for-free world, deciding to allow their fans (Deadheads) to record their concerts, which generally produced better music than their recording sessions. The result was a a huge boost in their popularity, although he noted that while they could fill just about any stadium, one reason was that – so loyal were the Deadheads – that the band pretty much trucked a large part of the audience along with them.

Tomorrow’s economy, he predicted, will be more about relationships than property, with value turning out to have an increasingly powerful link back to familiarity – hence the the benefit of the underground market in Grateful Dead concert tapes. Fans then felt they wanted the ‘totemic’ CDs, even if the tapes were generally better.

Extraordinary man – and someone I mean to follow up, not least because if his efforts to ‘wire’ the South. He even got involved in a project to wire Timbuktu, on the basis that – to paraphrase – “if you can wire Timbuktu you can wire anywhere.” One of his phrases that sticks in my mind – though it’s one I’d heard before – was that a key responsibility for us all is “to be a good ancestor.” That’s the very stuff of sustainability, done right. Later, as we chatted after his session, another delegate came up and the two of them compared their Japanese shoes. So I asked them both to bare their (Japanese) soles, which they did – though sadly I only caught John’s.

Thursday, February 09, 2006

THE BAHAMAS

Arrived in Nassau yesterday in the middle of a downpour, then took a Dash 8 to Grand Bahama Island. Elaine has come along for the ride, on BA Air Miles, but sadly we are both still suffering from congested ears because of the ‘flu I was wrestling with through Davos – and the unpressurised trip up to 14,000 feet on the Dash 8 causes more distress than did the entire transatlanic ride, I suppose because that flight was pressurised.

Am here to speak at the annual conference for US furniture manufacturers. Followed on from Clyde Prestowitz, who was a key trade negotiator when US-Japan trade relations were at their nadir, and recently pubished a new book, Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East. Clyde’s messages were forceful, hard-hitting, among them that the US is now on financial life support from China and Japan – and that the dollar will need to devalue by between 50% and 75% to restore some sort of balance. While this could well mean the repatriation of some furniture (and other) manufacturing to the US, the economic, social and political impacts would/will be dire.

Much of my presentation, sadly, went over the audience’s heads at something like 30,000 feet. One very intelligent woman even challenged me later as we got into an elevator as to whether there was such a thing as global warming? The industry is struggling with some of these issues, including how to break up and recycle prison furniture, an area in which they have trials running. But there is a real concern about moving from safety, health and environmental issues to wider sustainability approaches, not least because of the social equity dimensions – which makes these people, and most American business people, profoundly uneasy. And, meanwhile, President Bush assures them that climate change isn’t an issue.

Monday, February 06, 2006

PARAKEETS

Elaine and I recharge our batteries by walking around Richmond Park this afternoon, partly – I have to admit – to give the car a chance to recharge its battery on the way across. We use it so little that the battery (which is relatively new) keeps failing to start the car. Beginning to wonder whether we could do without a car: they can be expensive pests. As are the parakeets that continue to build their numbers across London and its environs, the expense being calculated in the impacts on other bird species that the parakeets dispossess from their homes and habitats. But they are still a stunningly attractive – if raucous – addition to the landscape.

Saturday, February 04, 2006

CLAWED FROG FUNGUS

If any one class of animals brought me to environmentalism, it was frogs – largely in Northern Ireland. Have been reading for years about possible reasons for the worldwide decline in frog numbers, among them climate change. Now a piece in today’s Independent (Michael McCarthy, ‘Pregnancy test may have spawned deadly frog fungus’) offers a possible root cause, or at least contributory factor. And the story underscores how interrelated things are getting in a world of more and more people doing more things and travelling more often.

Researchers at South Africa’s North-West University think that the international die-back in many species of frogs can be traced to the spread of the chytrid fungus, itself spread by the trade in African clawed frogs from South Africa – they were used in pregnancy tests from the 1930s through to the 1960s. The grisly fact is that a possibly pregnant woman’s urine would be injected into a clawed frog and, if she was pregant, the hormones would stimulate the frog to spawn within hours.

Some of the exported frogs were released and some escaped into the wild. The fungus, it transpires, can move quickly through water and can jump from one from one frog species to another. Apparently, scientists believe that the fungus is to blame for the diappearance of the golden toad of Costa Rica, and at least two-thirds of the 110 species of harlequin frogs from South and Central America. Nor is climate change blameless. In some parts of the world, shifting temperatures have made water conditions perfect for the further spread of the fungus.

Monday, January 30, 2006

Back very late tonight from Davos, which turned out to be the best WEF event I have participated in to date, for a variety of reasons – but one was what I think of the SETI effect. On my Mac at home, there is a SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program, which analyses batches of the latest electronic signals received from space. At times at such WEF events, it’s easy to feel like a SETI researcher, sending endless signals into space but getting nothing – or only echoes – back. But this time the messages started to come back, strongly, and from every direction. I soon lost count of the number of times I was stopped by people I had never met who said that they had been told by X, Y or Z to track me down at Davos. Chaired a session on Global Risks and was a discussion leader for two others events. Will write and post a summary of the event in the next few days.

One of a number of masks in reception area of Congress Hall

Klaus Schwab mask during protest

And another mask

Security fence

Peter Eigen of Transparency International spotted on Bloomberg

Social entrepreneurs spotlighted in Schwab Foundation corner of Congress Hall

Limos wait with their engines running

And more …

On his first trip to Davos, Richard Branson sells everything, up to and including Virgin Galactic

A few photos from our trip to Zurich, and overnight stay for a Sustainable Asset Management (SAM)/Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes advisory board meeting today. Last night we had a wonderful dinner with Alex Barkawi, Managing Director of SAM Indexes (http://www.sustainability-index.com/), and his wife Kecia, plus Michelle Chan-Fisher of Friends of the Earth (also just back from Davos, where she launched a new report on the banking sector,http://www.commondreams.org/news2006/0127-11.htm) and Dow Jones Editor John Prestbo.

Horizon from train yesterday

Fish in shopfront diplay – caught my eye in part because of sustainable fisheries discussions at Davos

Statue on water front

One of many beautiful signs …

… and another …

Peter in his spectacular offices

My reflection in a VW

Peter and Alex Barkawi at SAM

Monday, January 23, 2006

End of 3-day consultation at St George’s House, Windsor Castle, organised by The Environment Foundation, which I chair. This time, though, we were working alongside the 21st Century Trust. The subject: the prospects for sustainable development in the emerging economies, particularly China. One thing I discovered from Tessa Tennant of ASRIA was that Mandy Cormack, previously of Unilever and another of our speakers, is her older sister. Tessa’s language around the transition from bamboo to plastic is picked up in the scenario group I am part of and becomes one of the axes of the 2 x 2 matrix we develop to explore the interrelationships. We will develop summaries of the scenarios when I return from WEF.

After lunch, I jump in a taxi to Terminal 2, to catch a flight to Zurich with Elaine for the 2006 World Economic Forum event in Davos. Last time, I managed to lose the air tickets both on the way there – and on the way back. Elaine virtually refused to travel with me ever again. This time all I do is leave my jacket, and with it my wallet and passport, at Windsor Castle. Discovering the fact only when I get to Terminal 2, I then embark on a manic taxi ride to and fro to collect the jacket, making frantic calls to Sam (Lakha) as I do so. Miraculously, we make out flight – and get into Davos, finally, around midnight.

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Day started with a visit from Pati Ruiz Corzo and Laura Perez Arce, the prime movers behind the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve, in Mexico, who I first met via the Schwab Foundation (http://www.sierragordamexico.org/eng_entrada.html). Then into a wildly productive two-day strategy meeting for SustainAbility, with Yasmin Crowther, Mark Lee, Sophia Tickell and Peter Zollinger.

Monday, January 16, 2006

Across this evening to Buck’s Club in Clifford Street for the launch of the 21st Century Trust’s 2006 programme by Lord Patten. Arrived to find Lord Moore, formerly private secretary to the Queen, talking to a Polish architect I know about the Stalag Luft III prisoner-of-war camp in the country. Lord Moore said he had spent two-and-a-half years there in WWII, having been shot down on his first mission over Europe – in a Lancaster on a bombing raid against Munich.

I asked how many of the crew survived. He was the only one: as navigator he had been sitting towards the middle of the aircraft when it broke apart in mid-air. I noted that my father had had the good luck to be shot down over England during the Battle of Britain. I mentioned that in the 1960s Tim had subsequently met – quite serendipitously at an event at the West German embassy in London – the German Me109 pilot who had shot him down. Lord Moore seemed mildly thunderstruck. Said that when he once went to Germany with the Queen he found himself talking to a German who, again quite by happenstance, turned out to be the Me110 pilot who had shot him down.

Oddly, when I went to the same 21st Century Trust event last year, I met Baron Hermann von Richthofen, a direct descendant of the Red Baron. My Baron was once German Ambassador to the UK – responsible for the embassy where Tim met his would-be nemesis. A weird sense of wheels-within-wheels, or perhaps simply of the human brain as the ultimate in (sometimes spurious) pattern recognition organs.

Friday, January 13, 2006

Kavita – trying, as usual, to find out how to get to mysterious addresses

We stay at the Taj Hotel, hard by the Gate of India. In stark contrast to the grinding poverty we have seen in Delhi and, to a lesser degree here in Mumbai, the hotel today hosts a conference on ‘Luxury’. We see signs advertising it as we drive around the city.

Morning begins with a visit to the Tata Council for Community Initiatives (TCCI), where we meet Anant Nadkarni, Vice President – Group CSR. More or less wherever you go in India, the Tata Group (http://www.tata.com/) seems to be the dominant feature in the business landscape. The TCCI is chaired by Kishor Chaukar, who took an active part in the CII CEO Forum earlier in the week. An early broadening of focus moved the TCCI spotlight beyond community relations to environmental management, and now social entrepreneurship and sustainable livelihoods are also key focal areas. The 2006 ‘Tata Workout Session’ will be on sustainability.

Anant Nadkarni, left

Then on to PricewaterhouseCoopers, where we meet Drs Ram Babu and Muna Ali to discuss the nature and scale of the Indian markets for professional services in corporate social responsibility and sustainable development. Then back to our hotel on the train, which is an experience in itself, for separate (but ultimately overlapping) meetings with Deepa Ruparel of ISDC (Integrated Social Development Consultancy: http://www.isdcindia.com), who does social audits for companies, and with Nirja Mattoo, Chairperson of the Center for Development of Corporate Citizenship at the S. P. Jain Institute of Management Research (http://www.spjimr.org).

Train in the other direction

Women waiting to board their own carriage – and this is off-peak

Under way

Lunch on its way

Then a quick walk around the Gate of India before the day really starts in earnest. Kavita and I make our way over to the Hilton Towers to see the Bombay Chamber of Commerce & Industry. I speak at a meeting of their Management Committee. Walking into the meeting, with those present mainly being CEOs, company chairmen and the like, I decide on the instant not to use my slides and instead do a 25-minute presentation off the top of my head. In the event, it works rather well. Then on hot foot to give ‘Global Leader Lecture’ on the subject of ‘Sustainability and the Rise of India as a Global Power’. Then a reception, then into a taxi and out to the airport for a 02.40 flight back to London.

A cameo as the taxi blares its way airportwards. Under a huge underpass, 50-60 people are settling down for the night, on sheets of cardboard or rugs. On one, a young boy and – I assume – his mother are caught in an emotional exchange. She is crying her eyes out, in full view of the passing traffic. Few things I have seen here have touched me as deeply.

Gate of India through streaming water

Gate of India, from the sea side

Taj Hotel

Security men

Mother and child

Hitchcockian moment in front of the Taj Hotel

Thursday, January 12, 2006

‘BLACK MONDAY’ SHOWS DARK SIDE OF INDIA’S GROWTH

Our India visit coincides with a major political controversy about the killing of twelve tribal people protesting against – and demanding compensation for – land seized by the state on behalf of business. Sonia Gandhi, as president of India’s Congress Party, used a visit to the mineral-rich state of Orissa yesterday to condemn the slaughter on January 2 of people trying to stop the construction of a perimeter wall by Tata Steel – part of the giant Indian group we will visit in Bombay tomorrow.

Today’s Financial Times sees the attention being given to these deaths as likely to encourage other popular protests against development projects, including a modernisation project designed to bring Mumbai airport – where we flew this evening – into the 21st century. As the FT puts it, “The myriad regulations governing land ownership are a bonanza for venal politicians.” For eveyone else, as the Confederation of Indian Industry puts it, they are a nightmare – to use the FT’s words – “of Kafkaesque proportions.”

Another stretching day. Starts with a meeting with many of the environment/sustainability team at CII, including KP Nyati (who heads the environment management division) and Dr Aditi Haldar, Counsellor – Environment. Brian Kelly and Paul Tebo also take part. The plans for the new Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Development are exciting. Next, Kavita and I are off to the International Finance Corporation (IFC), who have partnered with SustainAbility on our work on the business case for corporate responsibility and sustainable development. Meet with Robin Sandenburgh and Sameer Singh.

Main part of the day, however, involves taking part in a conference organised by the new NGO Forum for Responsible Business, initiated by Partners in Change (PIC: http://picindia.org/what_we_do_NGO%20Forum.shtml). PIC CEO Viraf Mehta is also a member of SustainAbility’s Faculty, another indication of how seriously we are now taking the challenge of developing some sort of platform in India in the coming years. I talk about the conclusions of SustainAbility’s recent study, The 21st Century NGO.

Then across to the domestic airport for our flight to Bombay/Mumbai. Excellent flight with Jet Airways, reading a book I bought in Delhi a few days back, Travel Writing and the Empire, edited by Sachidananda Mohanty. A bit academic in parts, but fascinating nonethless. And, as usual, William Dalrymple’s contribution on Fanny Parkes and the process of ‘going native’ is spellbinding. Try to take part in a SustainAbility strategy meeting by cell phone as Kavita and I head into Mumbai by taxi, but my phone betrays me yet again.

Pamela Hartigan is in New York today and, among other things, signs the contract with Harvard Business School Press for our new book on social enterprise. Many thanks to our agent, Doris Michaels – who Elaine met when we were in California early last year, when I was giving a lecture at the Haas School of Business, Berkeley. Now the really hard work begins.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

RED FORT AND HAMAYUNA TOMB

The serious, grown-up parts of today’s program included a visit to India’s Institute of Directors (much more interested in sustainability issues than its UK equivalent, from which I resigned a while back because of their policies). But the real high points of the day for me were: lunch with Shankar Venkateswaran, Executive Director of the Indian end of the America India Foundation (AIF: http://www.aifoundation.org/) and a member lof SustainAbility’s Faculty; a visit to Kavita’s delightful uncle and aunt; and, later, visits to the Red Fort and to the Hamayun tomb complex. Sign of the times: surprised to see as we headed towards the latter in our car a street vendor selling the Harvard Business Review, among other publications. We arrived at the Hamayun Tomb as the sun was setting, which added immeasurably to the beauty and the pervading sense of melancholy.

Red Fort

On the road

Raju Prasad, our driver in Delhi

Hamayun Tomb

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Kavita and I spend all day at the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) CEO Forum, where I do a plenary keynote in the morning. Among those taking part from outside India are Brian Kelly, who is a key mover and shaker in the Sustainable Enterprise Academy (SEA: http://www.sustainableenterpriseacademy.com/SSB-Extra/sea.nsf/docs/SEA) and Dr Paul Tebo, recently retired from DuPont, where he led the charge on the giant US chemical company’s ‘sustainable growth’ strategy. They had invited me out to dinner on my first evening in Delhi, which had been a nice way to find my feet. Weirdly, and coincidentally, an email came in this morning asking whether I might be able to speak at a DuPont board meeting in March. Delightful dinner with a dozen or so people, hosted by Yogendra Kumar Saxena of Gujarat Ambuja Cements Ltd. Talked much of the evening with Ambreen Waheed. She is Executive Director of the Responsible Business Initiative, based in Lahore, Pakistan (http://www.RBIpk.org).

CII CEO Forum: podium and two shots of Paul and Brian

Monday, January 09, 2006

AN NGO DAY IN DELHI

If there’s one thing that India – where Kavita (Prakash-Mani) and I arrived yesterday – is not short of it is NGOs. But they come in all sorts of sizes and styles. Today we visited some of the bigger, more influential and better known ones. We did so in the midst of what is billed as Delhi’s coldest winter for 70 years: when we arrived at the airport yesterday, the temperature had fallen as low 0.2 degrees C. Quite pleasant, though finding our way out of the airport raised my temperature slightly – the place was bursting at the seams with hundreds of Indian blue berets and their kit, and our driver disappeared in the melee.

NOTE: My Indian photos look as though they have been shot through pollution haze and at night. Some, particularly the shots of the Hamayun tomb complex, were taken in evening light, but for the rest the camera seems to be in a slightly depressive mood.

We kicked off today with the Centre for Science and the Environment (http://www.cseindia.org/), where we met Chandra Bushan – who among other things leads the Centre’s work on the environmental ranking of companies and industry sectors. As we talked, we could hear the mewing of kites in the background: they seemed to be perching on the roof overhead, monitoring the passing traffic in pigeons. CSE was founded by the late Anil Agarwal, who I first met in the 1980s when he was with Panos in London. He commissioned me to write a piece on water issues dogging countries like India, particularly India. They have become dramatically more important since – indeed, CSE led the charge recently when Coca-Cola came under fire for alleged over-use of groundwater and for the levels of insecticide residues in its Indian products.

Smog from my hotel window

Kavita and Chandra Bushan

Anil campaigned on many fronts, but – although you can taste the air pollution even as your plane drops in towards Delhi – one of his greatest successes was in getting the country’s government and judiciary to drive the shift from petrol and diesel to compressed natural gas (CNG) for taxis, ‘autorickshaws’ and buses. One of CSE’s latest projects is a sector study on the cement industry, particularly interesting since one of the companie we plan to meet here ranks No. 2 in the CSE sector survey.

Later in the day, we visited WWF (http://www.wwfindia.org/), to see Ravi Singh, Secretary General and CEO – who I first met early last year at the WWF summit in Vancouver. As we spoke, and against a backdrop of whirling kites, a small squirrel with a three-banded tail fidgeted its way along his window sill – which made me take rather more seriously the notice on the door to his personal rest room declaring that the place is a squirrel sanctuary.

Rest room home for the restless

Next, we headed across to Development Alternatives (http://www.devalt.org/), founded by Dr Ashok Khosla, someone else I have known for a fair few years. We had lunch with Ashok and colleagues on the roof of DA’s interim building, which they are occupying while their new premises are built. Their motto: ‘Creating Large Scale Sustainable Livelihoods’. All hugely relevant to our growing interest in social enterprise and the scalability of small-scale experiments and pilot programs. A truly impressive organisation and team.

Finally, we head back to the India Habitat Centre (http://www.indiahabitat.org/main.htm), where we had started off with CSE. The Centre, in fact, ends up serving as a ‘strange attractor’ throughout our visit, with our peregrinations routinely looping back through its vast air-pollution-hazed spaces. Our last formal meeting of the day was with TERI (http://www.teriin.org/), where we had an interesting session with Director-General Dr R K Pachauri, who I first met 4-5 years back when we helped organise and facilitate a stakeholder engagement session for Ford in the US. He chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an issue that has even India exercised – though the unusually cold weather here at the moment apparently has some Indians querying the whole notion of global warming. One of the most impressive features of his office: a collection of cricket memorabilia, alongside probably the most extensive array of Christmas and New Year greeting cards I have seen anywhere, anytime. No question, the man’s connected, though I wonder (and doubt) whether there was anything from President Bush.

India Habitat ‘roof’

Dr Pachauri and part of his collection of cricket memorabilia

Friday, January 06, 2006

SustainAbility has always refused to work with tobacco, defence and nuclear companies. There are many reasons for this, but key among them on the nuclear front were the risks associated with nuclear breakdowns and meltdowns, the timescales involved in the disposal of radioactive wastes, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Such concerns were already in the air after the US Three Mile Island accident in 1979, but they became even more urgent in 1986—the year before we founded SustainAbility—in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster. Now the twentieth anniversary of Chernobyl will provide some of 2006’s great media stories. Mark Lee and I got one in early late last year, as part of our regular column for Grist (http://www.grist.org/biz/fd/2005/12/13/nuclear/).

The statistics that will be rolled out will do nothing to help politicians trying to sell nuclear power to the public. Take thyroid cancer, normally a rare disease, with just one in a million children falling victim. In the highly abnormal conditions found in the main Chernobyl fallout zone, perhaps a third of children who were under four years of age when they were exposed are likely to develop the disease. In Belarus, where perhaps 70 percent of the fallout landed, around 25 percent of the country’s farmland has had to be removed from production, and nearly 1,000 children die each year from thyroid cancer.

All of which makes the nuclear industry a very difficult partner for NGOs and others wanting to advance sustainable energy. Indeed, when the Chernobyl site was closed down in 2000, activists celebrated the beginning of the end for the industry. Today, they can point to the trend line for nuclear reactor construction starts as evidence that the industry is dying. The line begins by leaping upwards from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, peaking in the wake of the first oil shock, but then falls back sharply over the subsequent 20 years.

And yet growing numbers of people—including several well respected environmentalists—argue that the industry has a bright future, thanks to climate change. In 2004, for example, green activists were shocked when one of their idols (and one of mine), James Lovelock, the independent scientist best known for his ‘Gaia Hypothesis’, warned that global warming is now advancing so rapidly that only a massive expansion of nuclear power can save our industrial civilization.

There has even been talk of a ‘Nuclear Renaissance’. Climate change is one driver, but so is the ‘Peak Oil’ debate, the idea that global oil production has passed—or will shortly pass—its peak. The World Energy Council says that the nuclear industry is “poised to expand its role in world electricity generation. Plant life will be extended in some markets, such as Finland or Sweden; new plants will be built in Asia; governments and voters will accept the inevitability of new nuclear power stations in Europe, Africa, North America, Latin America, and even the Middle East.”

Meanwhile, some of the world’s biggest users of nuclear power are signaling that they will soon have to decommission many existing reactors. Strikingly, Tony Blair warns that by about 2020 coal and nuclear plants generating more than 30 percent of the UK’s electricity will have to be decommissioned. “Some of this will be replaced by renewables,” he notes, “but not all of it can be.”

Having written a book on the prospect for renewables as long ago as 1984 (Sun Traps: The Renewable Energy Forecast, Pelican Books, see http://johnelkington.com/pubs-books-science.htm), I’m about as pro-renewables as it’s possible to be – with a long-standing mistrust of the nuclear industry, having watched them fairly closely during periods like the Windscale/Sellafield THORP planning inquiry and via visits over the years to the Windscale area to see cousins. Nor do I want to see nuclear siphoning off funding that would be better spent on energy efficiency and renewables.

It seems to me fairly clear that we can count out nuclear fusion for the foreseeable future. For the west, the fission future will very much depend on things like the forecast price of fossil fuels, the cost of the carbon permits needed by fossil fuel power plants, and the extent to which governments subsidize nuclear power. New technology, like the much-vaunted pebble-bed reactor, will also likely play a key role in determining the relative acceptability of the nuclear option. So, whatever the outcome, we probably do need to review our ban on nuclear industry work at some point. If you have views on the subject, please e-mail me at elkington@sustainability.com.

Monday, January 02, 2006

Arrived back in London via Eurostar late last night, after four wonderful days in Paris with Elaine, Hania and her boyfriend. It was snowing lightly when we arrived in Paris. Walking through the Luxembourg Gardens (where we were taken with the graffito assuring us that ‘Life is not bed of rosese’), it became distinctly Siberian. Later, as we emerged from the catacombs on the first full day it seemed that the cold weather was set in for the duration, but not long after it turned to rain.

‘Life is not bed of rosese’

Some denizens of catacombs would have agreed, presumably

Happier times underground: Le Franc Pinot Jazz Club, Ile Saint Louis

Great meals at places like Le Dome and Angelina’s, near where we had to give way for a troop of 8-10 Segways semi-cruising, semi-tottering, along the pavement. Despite the extraordinary technology, which I learned about when reading the book Code Name Ginger on Dean Kamen’s attempts to revolutionise transport, there is something ridiculous about them in such surroundings – particularly when compared with conventional bikes, also in evidence.

Segways on the Rue de Rivoli

One day, Elaine and I walked around old haunts, including the Place des Vosges. I had come here in 1973, to stay with Gavin Young, the Observer foreign correspondent, in an apartment owned by part of the Rothschild family. I was interested in the Place des Vosges for a number of reasons, one was that it was an early attempt at town planning, which I was studying at the time, and it is now the oldest square in Paris, apparently. My main memory of the apartment was of a giant wood and canvas Siamese cat, perhaps six feet high. An extraordinary time in all sorts of ways, mainly because of Gavin’s company (our jaunts took in everything from La Coupole to the Marx Brothers and A Night at the Opera) and deep knowledge of the city. But it also sticks in my mind because Paris at the time was like a ghost town in parts, policed by CRS forces – because, I think, Golda Meir was visiting. And because Elaine’s brother had just had a near-fatal car accident and was in a coma.

Place des Vosges

Among the visits this time, we went to a great jazz gig at Le Franc Pinot jazz club on L’Ile Saint Louis (to hear a quartet led by by Pierre Christophe, playing in the style of Erroll Garner) and to the Centre Pompidou, to see the extraordinary Dada exhibition (http://www.cnac-gp.fr/Pompidou/Manifs.nsf/0/9F43A653A3897921C1256EBD00476011?OpenDocument&sessionM=2.2.1&L=2). Wish I had had a couple of days to wander around the exhibition, particularly once I realised it ran chronologically. Have always loved Max Ernst and Man Ray, of whose work there were masses of examples, including Cadeau, shown in my photo below. It was only after taking it – with no flash, as is my way in such circumstances – that I noticed that no-one else was carrying a camera, so tucked mine away.
Struck me as I walked around the exhibition that we may now be moving towards another period like the one that spawned Dadaism. We don’t have WWI, thank heavens, but the world as we have known it is in flux because of the impact, among other things, of the Internet, terrorism and counter-terrorism, and the entry of China and India into world markets. There’s no name yet for the deep stirrings under way, or maybe there are too many names, but 50-100 years from now the future (and exhibition designers) will no doubt have a name for what we are living through – and headed towards.

Dada exhibition poster

Man Ray’s Cadeau

A (very) distant view of the Eiffel Tower

Elaine and Hania at the Centre Pompidou

On the last day, yesterday, we walked until I almost collapsed, through at times fairly heavy downpours. Walking the streets suits me much less well than walking in the fields or mountains. So the last few images are studies in (fairly dark) blue of New Year’s Day 2006.

Dark clouds hung over the city, at the end of a year that has been traumatic for the French, what with the state of the economy, the voting down of the proposed European Constitution, the loss of the 2012 Olympics to London, and the recent race riots. In many ways, the Chirac era will be seen as a time of missed opportunities, but France will recover. Hopefully, while retaining and re-energising its culture, it will come back less arogant, friendlier. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but there was already some sense of that in the streets. People stopped and asked if we needed directions more often than I remember from past visits. Or maybe that was just post-Christmas good cheer?

The Eurostar home gave me an opportunity to read another 150 or so pages of Juliet Barker’s extraordinary book Agincourt, though I felt a need to hide the cover each time one of the French attendants arrived alongside. One of the most insightful books on medieval history I have ever read – and one that also brings home the startling emotional, family and social impacts of what happened just north of the Somme in 1415.

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

GONDOLIER’S NUNBUN

Apparently a week or so before she died, Mother Teresa approved the name ‘NunBun’ for the cinnamon bun discovered at a Nashville coffee shop in 1996 – and widely held to show a striking resemblance to herself. She agreed on the basis that the Bongo Java cafe, where the thing originally emerged from the oven as part of another routine baking, desist from using her own name to describe the bun. Now it has been stolen, The Times reports today.

The paper then recalls similar stories, where an Indian woman in 2003 chopped open an aubergine to find the seeds spelling out ‘Allah’ in Urdu, the Florida woman who found the likeness of the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich (she sold it for $28,000 on eBay when it – the sandwich – was a decade old) and the burnt fish finger thought to be a likeness of Jesus, and dubbed ‘The Son of Cod’.

The reason all of this caught my eye was that in 1970 Elaine and I were returning with friends from a long journey through Europe to Greece, and found ourselves in Venice. She and I had wandered off down a maze of alleyways, where we stumbled across a workshop where a wood-carver sat in a state of shock, or ecstasy. A day or two earlier, he eventually told us, he had split open a block of wood to start carving a prow for a gondola, only to find a startling likeness of Jesus in the heartwood. He hadn’t been able to do anything since. Yet more evidence that the human brain is a pattern recognition organ primed to see whatever it wants/expects to see.

Tuesday, December 27, 2005

PARAKEET AND SNOWFLAKES

As huge snowflakes – some the size of small chicken feathers – fell thickly from the sky this morning, a lone parakeet flew among them, trying to grab them in its beak. The snow was falling so hard it was difficult to see the bird’s colours, but the shape of its tail was unmistakable. Wasn’t sure whether it was being playful or, because this was its first experience of snow, bewildered.

Sunday, December 25, 2005

CHRISTMAS DAY’S A BLUR

Hania at electronic shrine

The four of us drive down to Little Rissington for Christmas with my parents, my sister Caroline and brother Gray – and his family. Or at least that was the idea. We so rarely use the car these days that it apparently feels neglected – and refused to start. We had to call the RAC. Still, we got there by lunchtime, though by some electronic demonry the fact that we had lost power meant that the CD player refused to work unless we gave it the magic word – and after all these years we had no idea what it was meant to be. So we did quizzes as we sped westward and G and H harmonised around Elvis songs, which was much more fun. Once there, we unwound. Gray’s daughter, Lydia, commented how much he and I look alike. When I looked back at the photographs, I could see what she saw. At some point, however, someone seems to have touched the wrong button on the camera, so many of the images came out blurred – some spectacularly so. People didn’t just look unwound, but unravelling. In the end, though, I got to quite like the spectral effects.

Pat goes spectral

Saturday, December 24, 2005

CHRISTMAS EVE

Reindeer

Jack Black: our Christmas fairy

Wonderful Christmas Eve dinner, cooked by Gaia and Hania, featuring inter alia scallops and gilthead bream – and the wildest chocolates, from a family friend. Made by L’Artisan du Chocolate (www.artisanduchocolate.com). My favourite: Sea Salted Caramel, made with unrefined sea salt from Brittany. As the day ends, Gaia and I watch Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven. Can’t imagine why it didn’t do better. Unbelievably beautiful cinematography. Even as I was watching I couldn’t wait to see it again – the first time that’s happened to me.

Kitchen 1

Kitchen 2

Unbaconed scallops are mine

Chocolate heaven

Gaia’s cake

Friday, December 23, 2005

SEASON’S GREETINGS

Racing between worlds, it has been a huge, ongoing pleasure to receive emails from people – some known, many not – around the globe, a fair number of whom have simply stumbled across this site. So for anyone who has come upon this entry, for whatever reason, let me extend my very best wishes for 2006 – and everything that comes before.

The image is from an exhibit (referenced in the 24 August and 4 October entries) I wandered back and forth across when with VW in October. The legs belonged to a boy who came sliding through as I took the picture. An assisted case of serendipity (see CounterCurrent, http://johnelkington.com/babelfish.htm), in that I saw him coming in peripheral vision. That’s the nature of my job, really. Scanning slightly wider horizons than most people’s work schedules allow them to. And, for me at least, the image caught the multifarious ways in which we all severally view the Earth and all that rides with it around the Sun.

THE YEAR WINDS DOWN

The week has been a blur of activity, trying to get various projects tidied away before the break: among them, the OFR process with USS (see 16 December entry); working on content for the pilot issue of Value magazine, which I have been developing alongside Laurance Allen (former publisher of The Harvard Business Review) and Jed Emerson (www.blendedvalue.org), particularly on the slightly provocative article I have done on the Davos 2015 agenda; a proposal to a major foundation; and down-to-the-wire discussions with Harvard Business School Press on the new book with Pamela Hartigan – which now looks quite hopeful, though the writing schedule looks perfectly horrid. Still, that’s next year …

Meanwhile, I have also been receiving a steady flow of emails from people who have been prowling around this site and reading the blog, which is very encouraging. Some 28 months after I started the blog, it has become more or less second nature – and, often, a useful prop for a sometimes erratic memory.

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

When SustainAbility first began to work with Ford, quite a few years ago, we raised climate change as a key issue. This stance was reinforced when we co-organised (with BSR) a major multi-stakeholder event for the company – and one of the three priority issues that surfaced was climate change. Not a message that most of the auto industry wanted to hear at that stage, with so much of its future fortunes seen to ride on the back of highly profitable (if highly climate destabilising) SUVs. Now, several years later, Ford has become the first auto-maker to embrace the concept of climate stablisation – in its first climate report, published today (http://www.ford.com/NR/rdonlyres/e6vzmdwyz2ycyehpwvuj5sdkrmfknipsreoyznmwwfqtzlwqfbfbcq44ckquxgn5xfir532knjvkq3ovbyhuscz7sfh/fordReptBusImpClimChg.pdf).

Friday, December 16, 2005

SA/USS OFR ROUNDTABLE

In recent days, I have been working with (Dr) Raj Thamotheram of the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) on pulling together a roundtable of those concerned about the Treasury’s recent announcement of the abandonment of the Operating & Financial Review (OFR) requirements on major UK companies. I chaired the event today, at USS’s offices in the City. By pooling our contacts, we attracted an impressive turnout from companies, the financial world, NGOs and consultancies that have helped clients up the OFR learning curve.

The summary of the session, which was held under the Chatham House Rule, will be published shortly.

On a personal note, it’s clear that Gordon Brown has set a cat among the corporate responsibility pigeons. Indeed, I can’t help feeling that he is becoming dangerously cloistered, with little personal feel for the corporate responsibility and sustainability agendas – despite his statements on the international poverty agenda. The sense is that he didn’t really know what he was doing, throwing the CBI and other business interests what he imagined to be a bone, only to find his ankles being snapped at by a growing army of NGOs, socially responsible investors and leading companies. The Government is now saying that what it was really trying to do was to ‘recalibrate’ reporting requirements …

Now we have to reclaibrate his recalibration. Although SustainAbility hasn’t been at the vanguard of the OFR movement – largely because our work on corporate transparency, reporting and accountability is more international – the OFR requirement has been seen as one of the leading models in this area. So we are doing everything we can to ensure that this issue is properly aired and addressed. Our new Chair, Sophia Tickell, wrote a letter on the subject to the Financial Times in the immediate wake of the announcement (http://www.sustainability.com/news-media/news-resource.asp?id=399) and we also signed a letter of protest from NGOs (http://www.sustainability.com/news-media/news-resource.asp?id=404).

Then back to the office to take part in a (very energetic and productive) teleconference with the SustainAbility Board.

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Flew down to Lisbon yesterday to speak today at the annual top management meeting of Sonae Sierra, the shopping mall developer (http://www.sonaesierra.com). Hadn’t heard of them before the invitation arrived, though was given a very useful background briefing by Julie Hirigoyen of David Cadman’s Upstream Consulting. It’s a sector with many challenges, though Sonae Sierra turn out to be way ahead of their competititors in the responsibility stakes – and this year, the fifth in this series of top management forums, the theme was ‘sustainability’. Hence my keynote.

Confess, though, that Richard Sandbrook (see previous entry) was very much on my mind as I was whisked at 140 kph through Portugal in a succession of taxis, against a backdrop of blurring tower blocks, shopping centres and windmills, both ancient and modern. Would our 1970s incarnations have seen what we have managed to achieve in the subsequent decades as real progress As I type these lines, Alvin Lee is singing the line ‘Getting Nowhere Fast’ on my Mac. But I think that Richard – like me – would say that, while demographic and commercial pressures continue to undermine global ecosystems, we have made significant progress in waking up many parts of business and the financial world. The real problems today are often, paradoxically our failure to truly convert citizens and – as a result – politicians and governments.

I started my keynote with three astounding images of the plume of smoke from the Hemel Hempstead explosion on Sunday. Made the point that we noticed the combusion of that oil because it happened in an instant, whereas if it had been burned on our roads or in the jetlanes of Europe we wouldn’t have noticed. As I stood by the Atlantic while waiting to do my session, a thin pall of smoke streamed out to sea from a fire on a nearby headland, a micro-scale version of what happened on Sunday. Most people probably saw it as cloud.

After the presentation, had a fascinating lunch with Belmiro de Azevedo (Sonae Sierra’s chairman) and Álvaro Portela (CEO and a great supporter of the triple bottom line approach), before another breakneck journey back to Lisbon, where I took part in a SustainAbility strategy session by mobile phone – with people coming in from as far afield as Zurich and San Francisco. The wonders of modern technology, though for my money nothing beats sitting together on a sofa.

Santa flies past in Lisbon airport

Atlantic 1

Álvaro Portela, CEO, addresses not just bottles but Sonae Sierra top managers

Pool, with smoke skein

Shadowed as I wait to speak

Atlantic 2Windmills and pylon

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

RICHARD SANDBROOK

What a year: Marek Mayer, David Pearce and now Richard Sandbrook. Though I knew it was coming, the announcement of Richard’s death in The Times today was still a shock. He had a quite extraordinary influence on our agenda. First met him in the very early days of Friends of the Earth UK, then periodically worked alongside him on projects at IIED in the 1980s, when I was between my ENDS and SustainAbility incarnations. As with many activists of the era, my mental image is of him in wreathed in cigarette smoke, a whirlwind of activity.

One thing that sticks in memory: driving together down to a conference in, I think, Malvern when we were both rapporteurs for the UK response to the World Conservation Strategy, which resulted in the 1983 publication of the UK Conservation and Development Programme. We were so deep in conversation, I managed to hit one of the gateposts driving into the yard at my patents’ home in Little Rissington. The collision hardly disturbed Richard’s stream of consciousness delivery.

While I did the industry report, Seven Bridges to the Future, which formed the first chapter in the eventual, encyclopaedic tome, Richard addressed the UK’s ‘overseas environmental policy’. Much of the process happened at the Royal Society of Arts, one reason why I have since had a great deal of affection for the RSA. It helped keep the green flame at least sputtering during the often-grim Reagan and Thatcher years.

Most recently, I caught up with Richard (who had gone on to a range of roles, including helping to found Forum for the Future) courtesy of Tim Smit of The Eden Project, where Richard was a non-exec director. Tim convenes a ‘Breakfast Club’ in Cornwall of long-standing environmentalists, partly in an attempt to broker a burying of hatchets and to build new constellations of effort designed to crack problems which, if at least in the realm of climate change, seem even more challenging than we started out in the late 60s and early 70s.

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

KING KONG AND BT

Great breakfast with Carlos Oppe, followed by a sofa session with a couple of the Ecodes team, exploring ways of working together. Then back to Stansted, where I waited in a cold, ghostly environment overseen by a glowing King Kong poster for the next train to London. In the evening, headed across to the BT HQ for a dinner hosted by Larry Stone (BT’s company secretary) and Chris Tuppen (who has long led the charge at BT on issues like the environment and corporate responsibility). Around a dozen people had been invited to hear the results of an MBA dissertation-related survey that had been carried out by Herman Schepers. On a side table, a new game that BT has developed: The Better Business Game. Lively discussion in the BT boardroom, high above a glazed atrium and looking out onto the Dome of St Paul’s, then home.

King Kong waits for a train

The Better Business Game

Monday, December 12, 2005

Flew to Zaragosa, via Stansted – first time I have flown Ryanair. Functional, but hardly a pleasure. Zaragoza (frequently rendered as Saragossa in English, derived from the Latin, Caesaraugusta), is located on Ebro river – and is the capital city of Aragon. Was invited by Ecodes (http://www.ecodes.org), the Fundacion Ecologia y Desarrollo, to speak in a series of ‘Tomorrow’s Company’ lectures, previous speakers being Hernando de Soto and John Kay. Walking to the Ecodes office, spotted a stork nesting high overhead: apparently they used to migrate south, but these days often don’t bother. Lunch at the Club Nautico de Zaragoza, alongside the churning Ebro, with people representing government, busienss and NGO sectors.

Ecodes did the Spanish translation of SustainAbility’s recent report, The 21st Century NGO, and that was a key part of my theme for the evening, the event held in the Hotel Boston. In the audience, Carlos Oppe, a longstanding family friend, who asked a challenging question: with a major Expro on water due in Zaragosa in a few years, will anything be done to clean up the highly polluted Ebro? The answer wasn’t reassuring. Really liked the Ecodes team – and am hopeful we can develop a closer working relationship with them in future.

Just around corner from Ecodes office

Stork and nest

And again

Lions guard bridge over Ebro

Bridge footing ploughs upstream

Words like sustainable, development and dialogue feature in Ecodes decor

Sunday, December 11, 2005

UNDER A DARK CLOUD

Geoff (Lye) woke to a boom and his Oxford house shaking early this morning, as did our neighbour – and they were some 80 miles apart. Then Elaine noticed a dark black cloud overhead here when she went out to get milk later on. Apparently an oil depot has blown up in Hemel Hempstead. Given that a fair amount of aircraft fuel is stored there, one of my first thoughts was whether my flight to Spain would still be happening tomorrow morning …

Satellite’s eye view

Saturday, December 10, 2005

Spent much of the day with the Trustees of the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, in their new office in Charlotte Street. Huge progress has been made with the B&HRRC website – and with the organisation’s expanding global network. Listening to Annabel Short recounting the story of having to clean the floors and assemble the Ikea bookshelves put me in mind of when Julia (Hailes) and her mother led the cleaning up of the Augean Stables at The People’s Hall, providing SustainAbility with our first truly independent offices many years ago. Just as SustainAbility started off in our Barnes home, so the Resource Centre – while supported by Amnesty – has been housed in Chris Avery’s flat. I think I have a reasonable sense of what a liberation the team’s move to Charlotte Street must have been for him.

One of the highlights, for me at least, was when Annabel gave a potted history of the denizens of Fitzrovia, including a nearby brothel in which flagellation was a speciality of the house. When I Googled one of the women involved, a certain ‘One-Eyed Peg’, I discovered that “the queen” of flagellation “was undoubtedly Mrs Theresa Berkley, of No 28 Charlotte Street, Portland Place” (http://public.diversity.org.uk/deviant/ssflg1.htm). She ended up a very wealthy woman, apparently.

“Her instruments of torture were more numerous than those of any other governess. Her supply of birch was extensive, and kept in water, so that it was always green and pliant: she had shafts with a dozen whip thongs on each of them; a dozen different sizes of cat-o’-nine-tails, some with needle points worked into them; various kinds of thin bending canes; leather straps like coach traces; battledoors, made of thick sole-leather, with inch nails run through to docket, and currycomb tough hides rendered callous by many years flagellation. Holly brushes, furze brushes; a prickly evergreen, called butcher’s bush; and during the summer, a glass and China vases, filled with a constant supply of green nettles, with which she often restored the dead to life. Thus, at her shop, whoever went with plenty of money, could be birched, whipped, fustigated, scourged, needle-pricked, half-hung, holly-brushed, furze-brushed, butcher-brushed, stinging-nettled, curry-combed, phletbotomized, and tortured till he had a belly full.”

And here we are campaigning against torture! More positively, the early social entrepreneur Robert Owen had lived literally next door while founding things like a labour exchange and a school.

At one point during the day, I tool a photo of a rather lovely ginko tree in the street below, which still had a blaze of yellow leaves. Chris Marsden, who chairs the Board of Trustees, noted that many trees are holding on to their leaves much later this year. Indeed, The Independent this morning noted this could be Britain’s first “Green Christmas”. Once again, as the sun began to set, the Millennium Wheel turned up on the horizon, several of its capsules glistening to the south.

Friday, December 09, 2005

CHRISTMAS PARTY

A slightly frantic day, trying to get various articles and slide presentations done ahead of next week, alongside celebrating the tenth anniversary of Geoff Lye joining SustainAbility – which represented one of the major turning points in our history. Then, after most of the team had gone off to ice-skate at the Natural History Museum (with my bruises and workload, I didn’t go), 5-6 of us headed off from the office to the Angel, where we had booked a delightful upstairs room at Frederick’s for our Christmas party.

First time I had been on one of those giant accordion-like buses that I struggle to pass on my cycle as they clog up London’s streets. sadly, this week also saw the final demise of the old Routemaster buses, one of the truly great aspects of the London ecosystem over the 30-some years I have lived in the city. The Routemaster’s passing is a tragedy, in many respects, not least the ability of riders like me to jump on and off at will. But this was a wonderful evening, with younger members of the team bringing in CDs to play on the restaurant’s sound system – which, to my delight, included everything from Nina Simone to Elvis and The Kinks. There’s hope for future generations yet!

Kavita skating, taken by Tell

Suzi, Tell, Kelly, Geoff and Ritu

Thursday, December 08, 2005

2010 + 2012 OLYMPICS

When I was in Vancouver earlier in the year, I suggested to Linda Coady – who heads the team trying to build sustainability principles into the 2010 Winter Olympics, to be held in Vancouver and Whistler – that the 2010 team should meet up with the 2012 London Olympics team. One reason was that I had recently intereviewed David Stubbs, wholeads the sustainability side of the London Organising Committee’s work, for SustainAbility’s newsletter, Radar (http://www.sustainability.com/network/global-influencer.asp?id=244), and had instinctively felt that they would get on. This afternoon, as a result, I found myself chairing a joint session between the 2010 and 2012 teams at Canada House, involving a range of external stakeholder organisations, from Bioregional, Demos, IIED and the International Business Leaders Forum through to the London Sustainability Exchange and WWF-UK. Overall, an excellent discussion – and Linda noted that this was an historic moment, the first time that two Olympic organisers had convened to discuss how to collaborate on the sustainability dimensions of their work. Afterwards, a delightful dinner at Inn the Park, in St James’ Park. Emerged very late to see the Millennium Wheel hovering over the Admiralty in the east.

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

BLACK & BLUE ICE

Cycling in to the office this morning, I hit a patch of black ice at a fair speed and whilst cornering – mercifully with no other traffic around – and ended up with swollen joints and a mass of bruises. Having returned home to get patched up, and receive a lecture on not cycling on frosty mornings, I cycled on. A wonderful morning, though by the time I got in various bits of the body were starting to seize up.

Frost patterns on our Volvo

Sunday, December 04, 2005

WINTER FROGS

As Elaine and I left for a walk in Richmond Park late this morning, I noticed the winter sun slicing in low and catching a pair of frogs on a vase in the front room. Later, as we walked around the Park, it seemed so mild we even thought of looking in a pond or two for frog-spawn, partly because some of the plants in the garden seem to be coming into blossom weirdly early. But we didn’t: couldn’t imagine that frogs would be that stupid.

That said, there have been some strange selection pressures at work. Over the years, we have loosed a fair few frogs in the Park that we have found and rescued in the streets of Barnes – largely, I suspect, because people bring frog-spawn or even tadpoles back for garden ponds, and the inevitable happens. Even had a fair old row once in the Isabella Plantation with a man who was carrying a great big black plastic sack of spawn. But frogs haven’t been the only things on our mind, not least because Jim Salzman, a professor at Duke University and a long-standing member of the SustainAbility Council, is staying at the moment, en route to a regular teaching jaunt in Sweden.

The Times carried a front page teaser on the Freeplay Foundation yesterday, as Kristine Pearson had said they would – and a two-page spread featuring the Salvation Army (one of the older social enterprises in the UK) and Freeplay (one of the newest, http://www.freeplayfoundation.org). Slightly weird concatenation, but wonderful breakthrough for Freeplay.

Friday, December 02, 2005

Drafted in late in the day as rapporteur for the Climate Change session at the UK Presidency of EU conference on ‘Investing in the Future’ (http://www.csr.gov.uk/feature.shtml), which focused on the finance sector’s take on corporate social responsibility. Fascinating gathering of the tribes, four floors below ground level along the Albert Embankment. Someone said, as I checked in my coat, that I must get bored with attending all these events, meeting “all the usual suspects,” but it turned out to be quite stimulating: there were a bunch of people I hadn’t seen for ages – and many more I had never met.

(Lord) Richard Holme chaired, noting that the bird design for the event (see photos) could be interpreted either as wild geese or dead ducks. Truth be told, at least to my mind, the event hovered somewhere in the middle: an extraordinary advance on the situation a decade or so ago, but – as ActionAid put it towards the end – not brilliantly effective in terms of identifying actionable new steps for the UK and EU.

One highlight was the report tabled by the CORE Coalition (www.corporate-responsibility.org), A Big Deal? Corporate Social Responsibility and the Finance Sector in Europe – although it contains a case by The Corner House of alleged bribery on behalf of Halliburton in relation to a 2002 project part-financed by the Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD), whose Advisory Council I chair.

The man of the meeting, though not present, was Chancellor and would-be Prime Minister Gordon Brown. He is increasingly seen – by all sides of the debate – as having screwed up royally in terms of his arbitrary cancellation earlier this week of the Operating & Financial Review (OFR) for large UK listed companies. Speakers from every side of the debate expressed emotions ranging from incredulity to incredulity (sic). As I noted in my summing up, while I have sometimes argued that we need a new generation of political leaders, if this is what we can expect from Brown I’d almost prefer to have the Conservatives. Better the enemy you know.

The reaction to the announcement on Monday of my new role and job title – ‘Chief Entrepreneur’ (http://www.sustainability.com/about/about-article.asp?id=374) – has been uniformly positive, even excited. Except for the heavenly (Baroness) Barbara Young, Chair of the UK Environment Agency, who declares it: “… the ultimate in poncey titles. One definitely for Private Eye. Does the man have no limits, I ask myself …”

When we were celebrating the management changes at SustainAbility yesterday evening, Matt (Loose) asked me whether I felt any diffeernt as the result ? The answer is yes, in the sense of in-the-process-of-being-liberated, but also no, in the sense that much of what I have done in recent years I will continue doing – only, hopefully, in a higher gear. But it’s odd how one result, God help us, is a strange sense of permission for leaning even further out into the future, the unknown …

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Flew to Zurich yesterday with Geoff Lye for a meeting today with Swiss Re CEO John Coomber and a couple of his colleagues. Flight from Heathrow three hours late, due to need to grit a runway. On the way, read a new report on climate change, Climate Change Futures, by UNDP, the Harvard Medical School and Swiss Re (downloadable from the Swiss Re website). A bit like the Book of Revelations. As we left the Hotel Helmhaus this morning, saw a poster on the facing wall across the street for a movie of the building of Swiss Re’s London HQ, the ‘Gherkin’. And there was Sara Fox, who managed the project and who I interviewed some time back for SustainAbility’s newsletter, Radar (http://www.sustainability.com/network/global-influencer.asp?id=197).

Poster for Building the Gherkin

A Swiss Re perspective

Birchscape

Sunday, November 27, 2005

BOOMERS AND THINGS THAT GO BOOM IN CHINA

The Baby Boomers are getting a fair amount of press at the moment, as they start to head towards retirement. Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times today argues that one thing that marks out the Boomers is their unwillingness to accept the processes of ageing and, ultimately, of death. He is writing a book on immortality that argues that Boomers, more than any previous generation, yearn to live forever.

I’m not so sure, particularly having spent several years researching a book on how previous generations thought of the afterlife. The appetite for some form of afterliving has now been a constant of human thinking for tens of thousands of years. Maybe the twin facts that Boomers have led what Appleyard describes as “charmed lives” in an increasingly secular world helps explain why there has been a growing interest in technologies that promise to help people live longer and look better in this world, but there are other ways of looking at all this.

For example, Elaine and I went to a 60th birthday party last night. Inevitably, many of those present were Boomers – and several were current or ex-Greenpeacers, among them Robin Grove-White, Peter Knight, Peter Melchett and Steve Warshal (a long-standing friend who edits Greenpeace Business). So my reaction to the Boomers-deny-death line is that it has been one of the most pronounced characteristics of the Boomers that they have affirmed and embraced life, in all its myriad forms. Environmentalism itself has been pretty much a Boomer phenomenon.

Which makes me wonder whether we will see last week’s events in Harbin, China, helping to spawn new generations of environmentalists in what looks set to be the twenty-first century’s largest economy? A 50-mile slick of toxic chemicals, including benzene, has spread down the Songhua River, forcing the authorities to cut off water supplies to more than three million people.

The scale of the disaster, of the attempted cover-up by Petrochina (a company I met at a dinner while in Beijing in May) and of the resulting media and public fury reminds me of the way in which the post-WWII boom in the USA and Europe resulted in a proliferation of disasters that, quite unintentionally, helped reprogram Boomers. Having talked to such people as Minister Pan Yue of China’s State Environmental Protection Administration, I think it’s very possible that we may see similar trends there. But we can’t count on it. The challenge for all of us, Boomers included, will be to work out how we can influence what happens in China. If we fail to help the Chinese make their forms of capitalism more sustainable, Boomer retirements may be rather less comfortable than many of those now moving into their sixties hope and expect.

And then, just as I was preparing to post this item, an email arrived from a young Chinese student I met in Oslo last week, reminding me that she and I had agreed to meet in London next month. One more indication that if we work this one well, the traffic isn’t going to be all one way. The next generation of Chinese movers and shakers will be reaching out for solutions to the problems their country of 1.3 billion will inevitably face in the coming decades. I see part of my task in the coming years as helping to position SustainAbility – and our wider movements – to rise to the challenge. And the resulting solutions could just help us turn the corner in terms of shoehorning a predicted 9 billion people into a planet whose ecosystems, to put it positively, are already straining at the seams.

As I flew back and forth to Oslo this week, I read Hugh Miles’ book Al-Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenged the World (Abacus, 2005). A fascinating story – and particularly useful background given the current controversy about an alleged conversation last year between Bush and Blair about whether Al-Jazeera’s offices should be bombed (a story which features in both today’s Observer and Sunday Times). While it is clear that they are far from even-handed, I have nothing but respect for the physical and political courage of the Al-Jazeera editors and journalists in bringing freer media to the Middle East – and, in these days of active news suppression, the wider world.

One of the most memorable lines comes early on in the book (page 11), when Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak asks to make a surprise visit to Al-Jazeera’s offices during a state visit to Doha. He and his staff are taken aback by the tiny size of the operation. “All this trouble from a matchbox like this?” he asks. On a different scale, we have had similar reactions from people who have visited SustainAbility over the years, particularly – for some reason – Japanese companies.

Got an email from Tell (Muenzing) as Elaine and I Tubed in towards Marylebone to say his car had broken down and he had had to take a train from Castle Cary – net result being that we would have to go to a Stag’s Leap (http://www.CASK23.com) wine-tasting on our own. Not something we would have chosen to do, but in the event it turned out to be truly fascinating. The Decanter Masterclass was given by Stag’s Leap founder Warren Winiarski and his daughter Julia. The Winiarski family had opened the Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in 1972 – and shocked the French when, in a blind tasting arranged in 1976 by an English wine merchant in Paris, with tasters who were French wine experts of impeccable credentials, the Stag’s Leap 1973 SLV triumphed over first-growth Chateau Mouton-Rothschild, Chateau Haut Brion and other famous wines.

Warren Winiarski explained how the French concept of terroir works in his part of the Napa Valley, giving us wines that showed the extraordinary influence of his ‘3Gs’ (grape, ground and ‘guys/gals’, the latter his attempt to capture the human part of the wine-making equation). The interplay between the seismic geology of the region and water-driven erosion was demonstrated in wines that were taken from different parts of the resulting alluvial fans across the Stag’s Leap lands, alternately fiery (the ones grown closest in to the eroding hills, where the soil structure was coarsest) and more subtle (where the soils were finest). He also explained how he applied the ‘Golden Rectangle’ approach to winemaking, but the most interesting exchange – for me, at least – came when he was asked a question about the potential impact of global warming in the region.

Long used to the temperature oscillations driven by the current systems off the California coast, he concentrated on them. But then Julia came in and addressed the question directly, perhaps indicating the way in which understanding of the climate change challenge varies across the generations. She noted that rising temperatures are already showing up in terms of “sunburn and shrivel” in the grapes. The result is that picking now often happens with scissors rather than knives, to remove damaged grapes from the bunches. Other strategies involve pruning the vines to form outward branching Vs, to shade the grapes, and picking the grapes at night – to allow them to cool down.

Then, a final, extraordinary flourish, Warren W said he had something special for us, a wine we would be unlikely to taste again. Because the commercial varieties of vine are now genetically impoverished, he has been travelling to places like Kashmir to find the original wild varieties. And he gave us each a tiny little vessel of a wine that he has made from some of these grapes, which he called “archaeological wines”, akin to Noah’s wine, high in both acids and tannins, very much like an alcoholic fruit juice. It was a wonderful opportunity to savour the roots of winemaking – an art which more than most encourages us to understand and appreciate the wonderful interplays of geology, geochemistry, ecology, biology, microbiology and the human intelligence.

Thursday, November 24, 2005

Spent past couple of days in Oslo, mainly at the Norwegian School of Management, after staying last night with Jan-Olaf Willums, a long-standing colleague and friend. This was after an excellent dinner last night with people like Professor Atle Midttun, Jan-Olaf and Jorgen Randers, who I first heard of as one of the co-authors of 1972’s Limits to Growth study.

This was a major conference on corporate social responsibility, which I kicked off alongside Professor Norman Barry of the University of Buckingham. The idea was that I would be pro-CSR, Norman anti. And as we were driven in from the airport it seemed we would find it possible to disagree on just about everything: he didn’t like rock’n’roll, whereas I love it; he loves Broadway musicals, which I don’t. And so on. But then the dykes began to leak as he admitted to an interest in Cream …

In the event, though the School’s new premises are truly spectacular and we got an excellent turn-out, I’m not sure we really engaged the fundamental issues robustly enough in the debate. It’s odd how academic some of these anti-CSR folk are, defaulting to long tracts on the history of company law. All very well, but as the world moves towards a human population of 9 billion and with the climate beginning to wobble, business needs to raise its sights a little. A point that the head honcho from Norwegian insurer Storebrand acknowledged forcefully during the first day of the event.

Inside the Norwegian School of Management

Studying wasn’t like this in my day!

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

THE LANCASTRIA

Postcard of HMS Lancastria in happier days

Trawling through e-mail ahead of a flight to Oslo, I came across yet another (this time alleged) cross-link to Flt-Sgt Berry, who saved my father’s life during the Battle of Britain (see 29 October and 14 September entries). A Frenchman e-mailed to say that he was researching a book on the 1940 sinking of The Lancastria off St Nazaire, the worst maritime disaster to affect Britain, with many thousands of British soldiers and sailors drowned. He also said that he thought that Berry had shot down the plane that bombed and sank The Lancastria (http://www.lancastria-association.org.uk/). A few moments of Googling, however, turned up the assertion (courtesy of the BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ww2/A4103056) that the German aircraft that put a bomb down the ship’s funnel was a Ju88, not a Heinkel 111 – the type of aircraft Berry was credited as shooting down over St Nazaire. But, apparently, Berry’s citation for the DFM mentioned that he had knocked down the Heinkel that had sunk The Lancastria. In any event, Tim – my father – is on the case.

But whatever the facts of this particular matter, I am continuously amazed at the extraordinary power of search engines in general – and of Google in particular. The power to surface accurate facts and inaccurate. Recently hugely enjoyed John Battelle’s amazing book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, one of the best business books I have read in a long time.

Sunday, November 20, 2005

RICHMOND PARK

Day of reading and writing. Wonderful midday walk with Elaine around Richmond Park, with fog still hanging over landscape, though by the time we got back most of it had burned away. The Canon IXUSi comes in handy again:

Strawberry grapes over our front door

Deer in the mist

Winter sun

Tree taking a rest

Pond 1

Pond 2

Saturday, November 19, 2005

THE ART OF COARSE WHALING

Various newspapers are bombarding us these days with free film DVDs. Last night I watched the Ray Bradbury/John Houston version of Moby Dick, which I can’t remember seeing before. Elaine’s sister Christine was here with her husband, Michael Green, author among other things of a series of books like The Art of Coarse Acting, The Art of Coarse Sport, The Art of Coarse Sailing, and so on. Turned out that many years ago he had also done a coarse acting version of Moby Dick for the Edinburgh Festival, although as we watched it sometimes seemed that the film scarcely needed lampooning. But it was extraordinary for its time. And fascinating to see so many elements of the 1956 film that would be echoed – intentionally or not – in future films, for example the whale-circling seagulls in Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and the marine monster modelling in Spielberg’s Jaws (1975). The whaling scenes that involved real whales reminded me, though, of the role whaling played in triggering early environmentalism, my own included.

Friday, November 18, 2005

Lively day, including lunch with John Manoochehri. Wrote several articles, one for a South African publication, Opportunity. Facinating session in the afternoon with Donna Morton of Canada’s Centre for Integral Economics. The Centre was originally launched in 1998 under the name NEW BC, initially as an affiliate of the Seattle-based Northwest Environment Watch (NEW). Those involved recognised the power and potential of economic instruments (like London’s congestion charge) to transform society. CIE projects range from airshed management through municipal ‘tax shifting’ to the future of grizzly bears in British Columbia. I emerged even more persuaded that this is an area where we need to invest a good deal more effort.

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Day begins with an extremely productive session with Sophia (Tickell) and Yasmin (Crowther) on the revamping of SustainAbility’s Mission, Vision & Values. At one point, President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address comes to my mind and, when Sam prints it off, it turns out to be a wonderful, emotionally charged stimulus for the task in hand. Other meetings during the day include one with Verity Haines of the Royal Society of Arts, on possible themes that the RSA could address in future, and another with Laurence Shorter, who is researching a very interesting book on the nature of optimism. Have always said I’m an optimist, though my (I think realistic, if painful) vision of where we are headed strikes many as profoundly pessimistic. For me, the optimism is in believing we can make headway despite the extraordinary scale of the challenges that face us.

On the way in – and yesterday – have been playing with an IXUSi camera that Canon very kindly gave me when we were with them in Tokyo. Fits into the palm of the hand, yet rates 5 megapixels. The photos below were mainly taken from the bike as I cycled in this morning:

Fence in Holland Park

Albert from behind

Horses along Rotten Row – more or less opposite our old offices

Achilles

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

ECGD

Back from Geneva in time for a lunch with Lucy Siegle, who writes a column on ethical consumption for The Observer. The range of ethical and green consumer choices is expanding, but it’s amazing/worrying how often the same few products surface in discussion. Much work to do. Then on to ECGD, trundling my case on wheels through Docklands, after which I meet up with Elaine for Shell CEO Jeroen van der Veer’s pre-Christmas party at Shell Centre. Then home.

Millennium Dome

Crane

Entry to ECGD building

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Whatever else it has been, 2005 has been the Year of China. The giant country has loomed every larger on our radar screen as the year wound by, not least because of my first visit to the country in May[1]. In addition to speaking at the Fortune 500 Global Forum in Beijing, I had wonderful opportunities to meet people from the Chinese government, business and NGO sectors courtesy of people like CGA, the China Business Council on Sustainable Development, Shell and WWF. Then, yesterday and today, I have taken part in the first China Europe Business Summit, held in Geneva by Horasis (The Global Visions Community[2]), which helped me to pull many of the loose threads together—although not all the conclusions were comfortable ones.

The China Europe event—now set to become an annual series—is the brain-child of Dr Frank-Jürgen Richter, who I had first met when he was the World Economic Forum’s Director of Asian Affairs. Now President of Horasis, he had asked me to chair a session on ‘The Chinese Approach to Corporate Citizenship’, which sounded intriguing. In welcoming delegates to Geneva, he stressed that “China’s rise to global eminence is providing formidable opportunities for European firms.” True, but the event also underscored the uncomfortable fact that European—and North American—firms are facing increasingly formidable competitive challenges from the same direction.

In the wake of CNOOC’s recent attempt to take over the US oil company Unocal[3], one panellist wondered aloud how long it would be before a Chinese company had a go at taking over Wal-Mart? Tongue-in-cheek, perhaps, but today’s lightly dismissed improbabilities have an uncomfortable way of becoming tomorrow’s probabilities and realities. And the same, inevitably, is going to be true for the Chinese. Issues that would have once have seemed impossibly remote to them, alien even, are now racing up the business agenda for Chinese companies with international aspirations.

CNOOC President Fu Chengyu was one of the top Chinese business leaders who made frequent reference to issues like climate change during the Geneva meeting. But perhaps the most interesting voice for the future of Chinese capitalism was the extraordinary Zhang Yue, who Forbes magazine listed—with his brother—as No. 25 in its 2001 survey of China’s 100 Richest Business People. Given that he was once a public school teacher, Zhang’s rise to success is even more striking. In 1988, he founded Broad Air Conditioning, where he is now CEO, and which has boasted an 80% share of the energy-efficient air-conditioning market in China. His personal quest, he says, is “to make society a better place to live.”

Zhang was also one of the panellists in the session I chaired. And while several speakers—including Serge Berthier who founded the quarterly Asian Affairs[4] and chairs Oriental International Strategies and the Asia-Europe-Forum—questioned whether China could afford to adopt foreign standards of corporate citizenship any time soon, Zhang repeatedly stressed the stunning nature and scale of the environmental challenges his country faces. Like a number of the companies represented at the Geneva summit, he noted that Broad Air Conditioning’s ambition is to go global. In the process, he noted, the aim will not be to become a “big company, but a great one.” And for that to be sustainable, the international corporate citizenship agenda will become increasingly important.

Several other speakers discussed the rising expectations and standards that all high-brand businesses are now expected to meet. Perhaps most strikingly, we had Eva Biaudet, a member of Finland’s Parliament and a former Minister of Health and Social Services. Modestly introducing herself as “a typical Nordic woman politician”, with an interest in such areas as human rights and climate change, she accepted that it might seem strange that a country of 5 million could have something to offer to a country of 1.3 billion. But she noted that Finnish companies are increasingly active in China, with over 200 firms now employing some 24,000 local Chinese.

That was the positive side. More challengingly, she explained how she is teaching her children to choose between products offered by different companies on the basis of their environmental performance—and, she warned, the behaviour of such companies will increasingly be vetted by western consumers for their performance in relation to such issues as environment, working conditions and human rights.

In headlines, we discussed three main areas of the citizenship agenda: international companies moving into and operating in China; national Chinese countries operating in the domestic market; and, the big long term trend, the growing number of Chinese companies operating abroad.

From the presentations of people like Nick Butler, BP’s Group Vice President for Strategy & Policy Development, it was clear that the best of overseas investors in China are doing their best to ensure that their operations in the country are state-of-the-art. But several speakers underscored the political challenges that will surface as China moves onto the international stage.

Tom Spencer, Executive Director of the European Centre for Public Affairs at Surrey University, and a former Member of the European Parliament, recalled this year’s ‘Bra War’. This resulted in over 80 million items of clothing – including sweaters, trousers and bras – piling up in warehouses at European ports. Spencer accepted that Zhang Yue was highly unlikely to face a consumer boycott against air-conditioners any time soon, but continued to say that the range of contentious issues is growing rapidly. Among others, he spotlighted the continuing problems international companies trading into China face in terms of intellectual property and counterfeiting. In fact this issue surfaced repeatedly through the summit, with some participants arguing that this has been one of the features of Chinese business practice (or, more accurately, malpractice) that has been preventing more EU companies from getting involved.

Interestingly, Spencer also raised the distinct possibility that the early twenty-first century vision—in the West, at least—of ‘turbo-capitalism’ evolving along Anglo-Saxon lines will prove illusory. Instead, our session concluded, the future is likely to be one of multi-polar politics and multiple capitalisms, with huge implications for the types of ‘corporate citizenship’ that will take root (or fail to do so) in the various world regions.

Our last speaker—but one of the most interesting—was Zhao Min, the Harvard-trained President of Sinotrust Management Consulting. When he and two colleagues resigned from China’s former Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation in 1992, Zhao scarcely dared tell his parents that he was venturing into the private sector—and met with sarcastic comments when he went to register the new company with the Beijing Industry and Commerce Bureau. Now Sinotrust employs over 600 people at its offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong.

Zhao joked that in the old order, the smartest Chinese became government officials, the next level down went into education, and (by implication) the bottom of the barrel went into business. Although he commented that there are very few companies anything like Broad Air Conditioning, he reported that business is becoming increasingly popular as a career path for bright Chinese youngsters—and, in a parallel trend, many business leaders are beginning to acknowledge the need not just to pursue raw profitability but also to manage against a “balanced scoreboard”.

The relatively low turn-out for our corporate citizenship session—which faced competition from parallel events on such themes as intellectual property, intangibles, corporate governance and innovation—led some of us to conclude that the title should have been more along the lines of ‘How To Make Billions From Corporate Citizenship’. But it will be fascinating to track the evolution of the emerging Chinese scoreboards as Frank-Jürgen Richter and his colleagues continue to build their series of summits.

Monday, November 14, 2005

FRANCISCO ANSELMO DE BARROS

Arrived earlier this evening in Geneva, for an EU-China conference. In trawling through e-mail after the reception, I came across an exchange among a group I’m working with on an environmental status report for the World Economic Forum. The report will be fairly gloomy, but even gloomier is the news from Brazil, where on Saturday a leading Brazilian environmental activist, Francisco Anselmo de Barros, is reported to have doused himself with gasoline and did what Vietnamese priests used to do at the height of that conflict. Badly burned, he died a day later.

Apparently, he had lost hope in his 20 year battle to protect the Pantanal ecosystem from the impacts of sugar cane farming, taking his life in a desperate attempt to stall the plans of the Governor of Mato Grosso do Sul to allow the construction of 23 sugar/alcohol plants in the Pantanal region. Having just co-written a piece for Grist arguing that those of us who engage business need to remember the activists who have created our agenda, with the focus of the article on the late, great Rosa Parks, this tragedy underscores the point even more energetically. The Grist piece is due to post tomorrow.

Friday, November 11, 2005

GLOBESCAN, LEAD & FORUM FOR THE FUTURE

A day spent skimming around London, first with Sam to High Street Kensington for a meeting with Doug Miller of GlobeScan (www.globescan.com) and Dr Simon Lyster of LEAD International (www.lead.org), to discuss possible joint venture. Then back to Bleeding Heart Yard for lunch with Peter Madden, the new CEO of Forum for the Future (www.forumforthefuture.org.uk). Interesting that so many of us now sense impending change in our field – and are aiming to drive our organisations in new directions. Easy to feel competitive, but there will also be a growing need for different players to come together to achieve scale.

Thursday, November 10, 2005

CAPITALISM AS IF

Walk across to the London Review of Books Bookshop in Bury Place for the launch of Jonathon Porritt’s new book, Capitalism as if the World Mattered. Published by Earthscan (www.earthscan.co.uk). Wonderful gathering of the tribes, but then had to race back to Barnes for a late teleconference with a US publisher.

Walked both ways from Holborn to Waterloo, partly to clear my head. Bumped into various people – including John Sauven of Greenpeace – returning from the South Bank celebration of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s life as I walked across Hungerford Bridge to a lunch at the Shell Centre to celebrate the first five years of the Shell Foundation (www.shellfoundation.org). As Shell CEO Jeroen van der Veer noted, the Foundation team under Kurt Hoffman have made a good deal of progress. I particularly like the work they are doing to tackle the indoor air pollution problem in developing countries, caused by cooking and open-fire heating, and currently having a particularly devastating impact on the health of women and children (http://www.shellfoundation.org/index.php?menuID=3&smenuID=10&bmenuID=7).

One of the people who spoke at the Foundation was Nancy Kete, who runs the extraordinary WRI EMBARQ program (www.embarq.wri.org). And she was remarkably candid about the political problems faced in major world cities as the EMBARQ team try to co-develop more sustainable mobility systems. But they are making progress. One statistic that struck me was that a fast-transit corridor in Mexico City they have helped develop now handles 250,000 people a day and saves them an average of something like an hour a day, either way.

A key strength of the Foundation’s work is its focus on leverage and scale. Sir John Houghton, one of the Foundation’s trustees but perhaps best known for his work on climate change, noted that it used to be said that rather than give a poor man a fish you should give him a fishing-rod and teach him to fish. Today, he suggested, the challenge is to build a fishing-rod factory – or even a chain of fishing-rod factories. A great way of putting it, as long as someone keeps an eye on the long-term health of the fisheries.

Today is the tenth anniversary of the executions of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni. Puts me in mind of the not-yet-published column I have just co-authored for Grist on the absolute need for all of us interacting with business to continuously assess our progress (or lack of it) in the light of the values and priorities of earlier generations of activists. In this case, we were talking about the late, great Rosa Parks, sometimes described as the “mother of the civil rights movement.” But Ken Saro-Wiwa’s agenda and legacy must also be a key benchmark for anyone professing to be a change agent in such areas as human rights, national and global governance, and sustainable development.

Sunday, November 06, 2005

ZHENG HE AND PAN YUE

Woodcut of Zhang He’s voyaging (from Wikipedia)

Back late – thanks to almost medieval levels of service on First Rail – from a lunch in Oxford with Vice Minister Pan Yue of China’s State Environmental Protection Administration and Zhang Xuejun, Deputy Director-General of the International Cooperation Center at the National Development and Reform Commission. Geoff (Lye) also took part and the conversation was a wonderful continuation of our conversation earlier in the year (see 19 May entry).

Minister Pan gave Geoff and I collection of Chinese stamps commemorating the 600th anniversary of the ‘Voyages to the Western Seas’ made by the ‘treasure ship’ fleets of eunuch admiral Zheng He (AD1371-1433). A Chinese Columbus, but on a much larger scale, Zheng He set sail at least seven times, but the voyages eventually petered out because of the lack of any underlying economic purpose (other than tribute-gathering) and attacks from northern tribes, which distracted the Emperor. I said that I seemed to recall that the admiral’s ships were burned after the last voyage, and Pan Yue said that many of his maps were destroyed too.

For each step forward …

Saturday, November 05, 2005

DRAGONFLY IN DISTRESS

On Thursday morning, ahead of taxiing out to Narita airport, Judy, Tomoo and I walked around the park in front of the Imperial Hotel. Odd how the robotic, bird-like call of the traffic lights – presumably to help blind people – are echoed by the crows in the park. As we walked by a pond, I saw a dragonfly (wish I could say damselfly) in distress and, stepping over the don’t-step-here ropes, I cantilevered out over the water to rescue it. As I scooped it up on a long stick, a mound of water built up ahead of a Jaws-like carp that obviously saw the insect (much admired in Japan) as lunch. Later, we strolled by a wedding and around a flower show, featuring chrysanthemums, bonsai trees and other plants that had been induced to mimic everything from jellyfish through maiden aunt hair-do’s to exploding neutron stars.

On Wednesday, we started the day with a session on corporate social responsibility at Nippon Keidranren, the Japanese Business Federation. Interesting discussion with Hiroshi Hirose, a Managing Executive Officer at Sumitomo Chemical and Chairman of the Keidanren Committee on Socially Responsible Management, on Sumitomo’s efforts to produce millions of insecticide-impregnated mosquito nets for the developing world (http://www.sumitomo-chem.co.jp/english/society/).

Then, in the afternoon, I did a keynote for the conference celebrating the 110th anniversary of Toyo Keizai (www.toyokeizai.co.jp) They are the country’s leading business publishing group, rather like our Economist group. One reason I know them is that they launched a Green Reporting Award in 1998 and then – in 2004 – a Sustainability Reporting Award.

The event was kicked off by Toyo Keizai President Hiroshi Takahashi, who was followed by Morio Ikeda, Chairman of Shiseido. When I began, I said that I didn’t know what it was like to be 110, since – at 56 – I was only half way there. Optimistic, given that when I returned home I found Elaine had cut out an obituary for someone I knew quite well over the years, Robert Lamb, who had died of a heart attack at 56 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1591737,00.html).

In any event, I said that if the amount of energy, imagination and professionalism that Toyo Keizai had shown in developing the conference were any guide to what it would be like to be 110, then I was happy to think I might still be alive in 2059. But then I noted that by 2050 the world’s population is expected to have reached 9 billion, Japan’s population is predicted to have fallen fairly dramatically, many of the fisheries on which the country’s diet depends will have collapsed, and climate change will really have got its claws into our global economy. After that I cheered up a bit and went onto a more positive footing!

The second phase of the conference was a panel discusion, with Professor Katsuhiko Kokubu of Kobe University’s Graduate School of Business Administration facilitating. We had presentations from people like Masamitsu Sakurai (Ricoh’s Chairman, President and CEO) and Yoshiya Hara (Chairman, Daiwa Securities). Then I summed up. Overall, it’s extraordinary to see how the corporate social responsibility agenda has pushed into the mainstream here.

In the evening, Judy, Tomoo and I joined Peter David Pedersen of E-Square and Takako Okamura (not the singer of the same name) for dinner at a wonderful restaurant on a hill overlooking Tokyo. She is an extraordinary young woman: used to be a newscaster, then lived with hippies in Australia and discovered alternative, low-impact lifestyles. She returned to Japan and founded the ‘Organic Concierges Association’, to train people to help citizens make the transition of an organic, more sustainable lifestyle.

Friday, November 04, 2005

CANON & THE SPIRIT OF KYOSEI

Flew to Tokyo late on Sunday, arriving late Monday. Stayed in the Imperial Hotel with Judy (Kuszewksi) and Tomoo (Machiba). Slightly disappointed to find the – admittedly luxurious – Imperial is not the one designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and opened in 1923, but a successor opened in 1970 – after the original building had been reduced to a shadow of its former self by floods, earthquakes, wartime bombing and air pollution. We did, though, manage to find the bar inside the hotel where elements of the old hotel are preserved.

Much of Tuesday spent with Canon, where among others we had a session with Yusuke Emura, Managing Director of Canon’s ‘Global Environment Promotion Heaquarters’. The company pursues what it dubs kyosei, which translates as “the spirit of cooperation”. Canon’s honorary Chairman, Ryuzaburo Kaku, wrote a piece for the Harvard Business Review in 1997 (July-August), in which he tracked the roots of the concept back to the period between 1500 and 1640, when Japanese traders were among the most successful in the world. At the time, however, “cultural differences led to considerable conflict. (Some things have not changed.)”

In response, a successful Japanese trader teamed up with a famous Confucian scholar to develop a set of guidelines known as Shuchu kiyaku. The central gist, “that trade must be carried out not just for one’s own benefit but also for the benefit of others. The regulations also stated that despite differences in skin color and culture, trading partners should be considered equals.”

Japan’s subsequent history included the shogunate, when the country entered a period of self-imposed isolation, and its subsequent, ulitmately disastrous period of militarism, which ended with the nuclear attacks of 1945. And it was while trying to evolve a philosophy which presented Japan as part of a wider world that Kaku-san came across the Shuchu kiyaku – and made its principles central of his corporate philosophy of kyosei.

After our meetings, we wandered around the Canon Gallery, which as a long-time photography addict I found fascinating. You could see the long march – or evolutionary ascent – of camera and lens technology, with many early designs closely modeled on Leica’s look and feel. Given that one of my earliest cameras was a Leica M3, I recognised that in a flash. But one of the most interesting exhibits, at least for me, was a cabinet showing some of the hundreds – perhaps even thousands – of components from Canon photocopiers, printers and other products that have been forced into exinction by legislation (particularly in markets like the EU and US) banning the use of such substances as cadmium. It was like looking down at the truncated branches of a fiercely pruned tree of technological life forms.

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Was reading Nine Horses, a slim volume of poetry by Billy Collins (Picador, 2002), this morning and idly musing over my long-standing appetite for obituaries. We get two daily newspapers, The Times and The Financial Times, and I always turn to the Times obituaries section first. In a poem entitled Obituaries, Collins has this to say:

But eventually you may jointhe crowd who turn here first to seewho has fallen in the night,who has left a shape of air walking in their place.

He argues that:

… all the survivors huddle at the endunder the roof of a paragraphas if they had sidestepped the flame of death.

She will be the first woman to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda. For me, her act of defiance, more or less exactly 50 years ago on 1 December 1955, helped lay the foundations not only for the modern civil and human rights movements, but also for the environmental movement. The combination of widespread passive resistance with the political ability to find the allies needed to drive through major legislative changes in the 1960s was a model that would later be copied by the best environmental activists.

Saturday, October 29, 2005

HURRICANE SURFACES – AGAIN

Weird how it keeps happening. Had an e-mail last night from Crispin Whiting, who had found me via the blog, saying that part of Tim’s Battle of Britain Hurricane (see September 14 entry) was being sold on EBay as item #6573315928.

Turned out that Crispin’s great-uncle was a rear-gunner in WWII. I said I had always thought such people were incredibly brave, or innocents aloft, given that fighters generally went for the rear-gunner first. He replied: “Tail-end Charlie was indeed an unenviable post – particularly in a Wellington, when the only way in and out was on the ground. George was presumed lost by the rest of his crew on the first 1,000 bomber raid on Cologne. After the bomb run he opened his vacuum flask coffee only to have knocked out his hand by a close flak burst. The coffee went down the intercom and he spent the rest of a cold run home listening to the skipper first of all urgently calling ‘George, George, are you OK?’ and then the rest of the crew discussing how poor old George had bought it.”

In a later e-mail, Crispin wondered whether the story hadn’t got slightly exaggerated over the years, but it brought back those utterly grim missions in a very human way.

Across to St Paul’s area to facilitate a stakeholder session for BHP Billiton (http://www.bhpbilliton.com/bb/sustainableDevelopment/home.jsp) with Judy Kuszewski. On the BHPB side, one of those taking part was Mick Roche, who has played a central role in getting the ‘Green Lead’ initiative off the ground (www.greenlead.com). As he has long admitted, this is an oxymoron, but I’m impressed with what I have heard, and interested to see whether the same approach can be applied elsewhere in the industry. This is something BHP Billtion are already working on. Another initiative the company is involved in, designed to tackle ethical, social and environmental issues in the trade of diamonds and gold, is the Council for Responsible Jewellery Practices (http://www.responsiblejewellery.com).

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

First General Electric, now Wal-Mart – who next? ExxonMobil? The number of major ‘problem’ corporations appearing to roll over in the US is growing, with Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott claiming to have had an epiphany on climate change and the wider environmental challenge (http://walmartstores.com/GlobalWMStoresWeb/navigate.do?catg=463). “This used to be controversial, but the science is in and it is overwhelming,” he said. He also noted that “we should view the environment as [Hurricane] Katrina in slow motion.” Wal-Mart now says it will invest $500 million a year in new technology, including renewable energy systems.

Well, I’m not usually one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I’ll bet the Trojans wished they had. And there is something about the nature of Wal-Mart’s pledges which suggest that this huge commercial predator is highly unlikely to change its political and commercial spots any time soon. Scott said that Wal-Mart was going to move on from its historic “defensive posture”, but this still seems like little more than active defence, given the growing pressures brought to bear on it recently in such areas as healthcare provision for workers, the destruction of town centres (with some critics seeing it as a “retail cancer”), for destroying local jobs through outsourcing, a shoddy environmental record, and so ever on. The old phrase “Trust – but verify” comes to mind, but even though Conservation International is apparently backing the company (though I don’t see anything on its website to that effect), I can’t imagine trusting Wal-Mart this side of the next millennium.

Saturday, October 22, 2005

Thursday, September 29, 2005

Walked off the red-eye at JFK in surprisingly good fettle, after a couple of hours of sleep at best, and was sped north to New Haven and Yale in a Lincoln Town Car. Picked up from the hotel by Monica Araya, who is doing a PhD on corporate transparency and accountability – and played a key role in organising the event I am due to speak at later in the day.

Then was shuttled – on occasion in heavy rain driving almost horizontally – between sessions with James Gustave Speth (Dean of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies), Daniel Esty, who runs the School’s Center for Environmental Law and Policy (http://www.yale.edu/envirocenter/) and a group of Faculty members and students, over lunch. Among them Reid Lifset, editor of The Journal of Industrial Ecology (see http://mitpress.mit.edu/jie).

Have known Gus since 1984, when we met at a UN Environment Programme conference in Versailles. In the mid-1980s, when he was still at WRI, he commissioned three reports from me between 1986 and 1989. These were all focused on the implications of a range of technologies for – and potential applications in – sustainable development: Double Dividends focused on genetic engineering and wider forms of biotechnology, The Shrinking Planet on computing and remote sensing technologies, and Cleaning Up on waste management technology (http://johnelkington.com/pubs-reports.htm).

One of the things we talked about was the School’s planned new building project, the Kroon Building. This is being designed by Britain’s Hopkins Architects (http://www.hopkins.co.uk), who also designed London’s new Parliamentary Building. But why didn’t a US firm get the prestigious project? The asnwer is that the EU – and UK – are seen as taking the Kyoto Protocol on climate change much more seriously, with the result that levels of energy efficiency and building sustainability are higher than in the US. A US firm that had competed for the project, Centerbrook Architects and Planners, agreed to take on the role of executive architects instead of designers, something they had never done before. “We really felt there was a lot to be learned here,” explains Centerbrook partner Mark Simon (see Environment Yale, Spring 2005).

Then later the same afternoon I spoke at the 2-hour, standing-room-only session in the Bowers Auditorium, advertised in the poster below. It was kicked off by Dan Esty (who I first some years back through the World Economic Forum) and ended with a panel discusion with three key Yale people in this area: Marian Chertow, Director of the Industrial Environmental Management Program (http://www.yale.edu/environment), Brad Gentry, Project Director, Private International Finance and the Environment Project (http://www.yale.edu/forestry/bios/gentry.html) and Nat Keohane (Assistant Professor in economics at the School of Management). The debate was astonishingly polite and supportive, and I very much enjoyed the conversations afterwards with students from various departments. Then off to dinner at Zinc.

One of the most interesting things going on at Yale is Dan’s Environmental Sustainability Index (http://www.yale.edu/esi/). The 2005 Index, Benchmarking National Environmental Stewardship:The Environmental Sustainability Index, was released in Davos, Switzerland, at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum on Friday, 28 January 2005. And now they are working on the 2006 Environmental Performance Index (emphasis is mine). For more, see http://www.yale.edu/epm. We shall be keeping a much closer eye on Yale, for this and many other reasons.

The building in which we visited Dan Esty, originally owned by the Winchester rifle family – and, when abandoned for some time, apparently known as ‘The Frankenstein House’.

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Waiting for the red-eye jetBlue flight from Portland to New York, at around midnight. Having flown out to Oregon on Monday, I have spent two days with Nike’s corporate responsibility team, their first offsite meeting (of over 100 people) for some years. Wonderful opportunity to catch up with the likes of Hannah Jones and Sarah Severn, who have been key in driving the corporate responsibility agenda within the company. Fantastic atmosphere and a growing sense that Nike has turned the corner with their 2004 corporate responsibility report, which I read again on the flight out (http://www.nike.com/nikebiz/nikebiz.jhtml?page=24). Extraordinary, particularly if you think what even leading companies were proeared to reveal (very little) when we started off on the reporting beat back in the early 1990s.

But one of the most interesting things for me was to hear more about Nike’s ‘Considered’ product line, which aims to embed sustainability factors from the outset and throughout the product life cycle (http://www.nike.com/nikebiz/nikeconsidered/). Had a great lunch with John Hoke, Vice-President for Footwear Design, whose interest in sustainable design could well hold the seeds of a very different Nike. In terms of life cycles, one of the outside exercises included everyone being instructed to form a line from those born longest ago to those born most recently. I was No. 3 at the grey/gray end of the line. As someone kindly (but accurately) pointed out, the only thing beyond us was a grave-shaped heap of earth.

The off-site was held in one of an extraordinary chain of hotels, the McMenamin Historic Hotels – specifically, in the McMenamin Edgefield (http://www.mcmenamins.com/index.php?loc=3&id=44). For the US, this was seriously eccentric. Originally a ‘poor farm’ for distressed people during the Depression and an insane asylum. In the grounds was a giant orange-red water tank on stilts and my favourite of many murals inside the main building was a vast painting around a staircase of two old ladies in their nighties, sitting astride the water tower as it turns into a rocket and blasts into the starry night sky. Slight shock to find that the facilities were somewhat remote from the bedrooms and shared, but nothing to what people went through in the 1930s!

Water tower

Rocketing up

Dusty Kidd orchestrates a session voting on likely outcome of World Cup football

Exit

Detail of painting on my bedroom door!

Saturday, September 24, 2005

JEREMY CLARKSON’S LOATHING

Well, at least it’s mutual. Jeremy Clarkson – of BBC’s Top Gear motoring programme – confessed this evening to a “deep-seated loathing of environmentalists.” If you haven’t come across him, try http://www.bbcworld.com/content/template_clickpage.asp?pageid=2231. He’s the one who has declared that he wants to run over cyclists who run red lights. I think that cyclists should have lights and obey the Highway Code, but his boorishness is increasingly shading into the area of generational war-crimes. His stance on issues like SUVs and climate change, for example, is several light-years to the right of George W. Bush.

This evening, while looking for a programme on the Waffen SS, we accidentally switched into a Clarkson program that wasn’t billed in the listings, and it turned out to be surprisingly interesting. He was tracing his ancestors and discovered that the inventor of the Kilner Jar was among them.

He drove around the country in his RangeRover SUV, archly wondering what had happened to the billions that “should have been his.” Ironically, he found that the Kilners (who pumped out smoke 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, because they couldn’t shut down their furnaces) had lost a major pollution battle with a neighbour, the Earl of Scarborough. The judge (who Clarkson groaned must have been related to UK environmentalist Jonathon Porritt) ruled that “no man has the right to interfere with the supply of clean air.” And the final irony? Clarkson found that the site of one of the key Kilner factories was later home to the (now defunct) Earth Centre, a self-styled Mecca for environmentalists which failed to attract enough to make a go of things.

It was somewhat surprising that Clarkson didn’t make more of that failure. The sad history of the Centre is summarised by Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Centre,_Doncaster). I remember the days when Jonathan Smales, the driving force behind the Centre, came around to SustainAbility’s offices in The People’s Hall, near Latimer Road, looking for help. And it’s interesting that the Eden Project, founded by Tim Smit and crew, has done much better – largely because it has been much more commercially minded.

It’s genuinely sad that in Clarkson’s brain it seems to be a Manichean universe, in which it’s a battle to eternity between enterprise and environment. Particularly since that’s what seems to have killed his ancestors’ business. Maybe the incapacity to spot what is going on in the wider world is genetic, a function of the inbreeding he implicitly referred to when he said that all his ancestors on one side of the family seem to come from the same village? The programme ended with a flashover between a photo of the ancestor most directly implicated in the failure of the family business, who looked as if he had been born and bred in the Appalachians, and a picture of a youthful Clarkson, with long curly hair – and looking as if he had jumped a century. Maybe one of his glass-making ancestors stumbled on a recipe for time travel? If so, future generations must hope that the Clarksons have lost the keys.

As I sat in the garden this afternoon, enjoying the waning days of the British summer, and catching a breath between writing tasks, one of our two robins came and sat alongside, singing its heart out. Which reminded me of the photo in an article in today’s Independent covering the illegal ambelopoulia trade in Cyprus. It showed a robin dangling upside down from a ‘lime stick’ in Cyprus.

According to the RSPB (http://www.rspb.org.uk/international/illegal_hunting/cyprus/index.asp) , around 3.7 million birds are shot every year, of which some 750,000 are shot illegally. Small birds, and especially blackcaps, migrating through Cyprus are trapped for sale nationally as the Cypriot food delicacy, ambelopoulia. When Elaine and I were in Northern Cyprus earlier in the year, we were struck by the absence of bird-song in many areas.

The technique used to catch the birds is particularly repulsive. The preparation of ‘lime sticks’ involves coating a pomegranate branch with a sticky resin. The birds land on the branch, become stuck and many gnaw off their own legs in their efforts to escape. The numbers of bird deaths caused in this way have been cut dramatically in recent years, but RSPB-funded BirdLife Cyprus (http://www.birdlifecyprus.org/) stresses that the trade still operates in high gear – hardly surprising given that a dozen of these small birds now sells for £22.

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Slightly odd concatenation of circumstances today. After a morning spent planning future issues of SustainAbility’s newsletter, Radar (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/radar.asp), I travelled across to Docklands for the latest meeting of the ECGD Advisory Council. Then back to John Adam Street for the Royal Society of Art’s evening debate on enterprise and the Society’s five Manifesto Challenges (http://www.rsa.org.uk/events/detail.asp?eventID=1739). On a panel with Baroness Glenys Thornton, (Chair, Social Enterprise Coalition), Valerie Bayliss (Director, RSA Opening Minds Project), Richard Murphy (founder, Tax Justice Network) and, in the chair, John Knell (Director of the Intelligence Agency).

At one point, I used a slide of the WEEE Man (http://www.thersa.org/projects/weee_man.asp), which the RSA has organised to dramatise the volumes of electrical and electronic waste each of us produces over a lifetime. Then home, where I discovered that the second of the columns that I do with Mark Lee for Grist has just been posted (http://www.grist.org/biz/fd/2005/09/20/weee/). And the subject is the WEEE Directive and various other EU laws that are helping shape international markets – though the press today carried the story that the EU’s new air quality proposals have just been watered down following industry pressure.

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Among a blizzard of meetings today, had a fascinating session with Nick Parker of Cleantech Ventures (http://www.cleantech.com/), who I have known for years. Have been getting a number of invitrations from this sector recently, which is erupting in the sustainability space. It’s fascinating how the ‘cleantech’ language is coming up the curve, very much like biotech in the 1970s and 1980s. One of the concerns must be another ‘tech bubble’, but cleantech potentially represents a big jump forward from the more traditional slow growth, engineering dominated markets (e.g. waste management) to a whole raft of new, potentially much higher growth opportunity spaces ( he instances solar). Nick sees all of this as reflecting a switch from regulatory drivers to market drivers, from concerns about compliance to growing interest in productivity, and from end-of-pipe to front-of-pipe.

Saturday, September 17, 2005

Very sorry to read today in The Independent of the sudden death of Professor David Pearce (http://www.econ.ucl.ac.uk/davidpearce.php), someone I had known since the early 1970s. His work on environmental economics and insistence on the primacy of markets in dealing with environmental problems had a major influence on my own thinking. His Blueprint for a Green Economy, written with Anil Markandya and Ed Barbier, was published in 1989, the year after our own Green Consumer Guide appeared. We shared membership of the UN Global 500. At a time when I’m trying to get SustainAbility to focus more on economics, he’s someone I’d have tried get to help us, yet another reason to regret his passing.

We had read that today would see a Richmond-to-Greenwich armada of boats, but thought we had missed it. Then Elaine and Gaia called as they headed across to Waitrose to say that the tail end was still passing on the Thames, a block or two away. I cycled over to the river wall and caught a few last boats making their way east. This was the 22-mile Trafalgar Great River Race along the Thames – to help people living with cancer. The event is now in its eighteenth year (http://www.macmillan.org.uk/news/news.asp?nid=1758).

Hania also called this morning to say she was on her way home after completing the 17-mile through-the-night walk around London to raise money for the Maggie’s Centre movement (http://www.maggiescentres.org/). The walkers were treated to visits to a number of key buildings as they wended their way, including City Hall. Belatedly, wish I had gone. A new Maggie’s Centre, designed by Sir Richard Rogers, has now got planning permission (http://www.richardrogers.co.uk/render.aspx?siteID=1&navIDs=1,6,12,1156). As I cycled back across Hammersmith Bridge last night, a stunningly beautiful moon was dropping out of the bottom of a plum-coloured cloud hanging over the Richard Rogers complex just to the east.

Friday, September 16, 2005

According to FT.com, a senior executive at Cnooc, the Chinese oil company that failed to win buy Unocal earlier in 2005–which Mark Lee and I discussed in a recent Grist column (http://www.sustainability.com/news-media/news-resource.asp?id=349)–said political pressure to block China’s access to oil and gas abroad was a serious infringement of human rights. Yang Hua, the company’s chief financial officer and main negotiator with Unocal, said it was important for the world to grant both China and India, which are now major consumers of oil and gas, long-term energy security. “What is ‘human rights’? I’ll tell you what it means. It means having guaranteed access to energy. It means having petroleum to run your car.”

Thursday, September 15, 2005

DRAMA AT PERSIAN EXHIBITION

After lunch with triple bottom line expert Mark McElroy, I headed across to the British Museum to meet Elaine and see the Persian Exhibition. If I had paid to get in, I think I would have been disappointed, but dramatic events ensured we got in for free. The exhibits – some really extraordinary – were packed into a space that was extremely dark and seemed about the size of a modest London flat.

And the events? In a development worthy of Agatha Christie, someone either fell or was pushed from a great height inside the Museum and the whole place went into seizure as police cars and ambulances (van, car and motorcyle versions) began to arrive. Not sure whether the person died, but the gates were all closed and hundreds of people were trapped inside wanting to get out – and outside, still wanting to get in. Elaine and I wandered around the odd sculpture garden in front of the Museum, with its pink and green figures that also seem to have dropped from a height and then reassembled.

Various people then addressed the confused hordes, and from one of them I thought I gathered that someone had thrown a germ warfare weapon and that we were going to be held in quarantine. (True, I had been reading the September 19 edition of BusinessWeek earlier in the day, which explores the various crises that could further overwhelm US security processes, from a homemade nuke to terrorists pumping smallpox or Ebola into a subway or airport, so maybe my neurons were over-inflamed.) But God knows what non-English-speakers made of it all. In the end, we were all eventually released into the afternoon, with no further explanation.

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

HURRICANE JX-O

With Hurricane Katrina uppermost in many people’s minds, a different sort of Hurricane was in ours over the weekend, the Hawker Hurricane. Parts of my father’s Hurricane have been sent through to us over the years by archaeologists who found its wreckage deeply embedded in West Sussex farmland. And now WWII aviation simulators have been toying around with his machine and film-makers have been recording his experiences when he and his colleagues were involved in the Battle of Britain and, later, when they were transferring Hurricanes to the Russians via Murmansk and Archangel – and training Soviet pilots to fly them.

I hadn’t realised that pilots had their own identifiers painted on their aircraft. The one in which he was shot down on 16 August 1940 was JX-O, as was the subsequent machine he is pictured alongside (see below) when he returned to No. 1 squadron in October that year. And the same identifier now shows up on a virtual version of his original machine (see below) in a Battle of Britain game, thanks to American simulators.

SustainAbility has long offset its carbon emissions, both directly and through a small surcharge on contracts. So it’s good to see two more UK companies offering customers the option of offsetting their carbon emissions, in this case via Climate Care. They are:

British Airways, which has launched a carbon offset scheme to enable their customers to offset the carbon emissions from their flights through Climate Care. Customers that book British Airways flights at www.ba.com can offset their carbon emissions via the booking confirmation form or at www.ba.com/offsetyouremissions.

British Gas, which has launched an initiative that gives their customers the chance to offset the carbon emissions from their gas and electricity use. The initiative, called ‘Climate Aware’, enables British Gas customers to offset their emissions using an online calculator. Customers who sign-up are also offered an energy efficiency audit to help them reduce emissions in the year ahead. British Gas customers can sign up to Climate Aware online at www.house.co.uk/climate

Monday, September 12, 2005

ASHES, BAILS, BALES & GRAVES

My mother Pat’s 83rd birthday, so Elaine and I had headed west last night to Little Rissington, to celebrate. During the morning, the three of us drove across to Burford, to buy her some birthday plants, and came back with a car-full.

Striking how much road-kill there is on the highways and byways: among other things, I saw dead representatives of the pheasant, fox, rabbit, rat and squirrel families. Not sure I wouldn’t prefer to be back in the pony-and-trap era: Pat remembers riding through country lanes in such a conveyance and having time to see and smell the wildflowers. Managed to slam the car into a shuddering stop on the way home, just past Burford’s old woolpack bridge, by shifting from third gear into Drive, something I don’t normally do, but had been experimenting down Burford’s steeply inclined main drag, conditions in which automatic Volvos seem to run away with themselves. The SUV behind me managed to avoid a metallic coupling with our rear end. I think I’ll be staying in automatic from now on.

In the afternoon, Elaine and I walked out past the church, and then around the fields overlooking the Windrush valley as the sun inclined towards the horizon. Hedges are full of blackberries and sloes. The sequence of photos below take the viewer from beyond the church, through the graveyard, down the path through Church Field (with Hill House visible in the distance), through the gate, and then around the end of Hill House and into the garden. Often strikes me that you could walk through the same landscape and take images that were either idyllic or grotesque. I was in somewhat mellow, autumnal mood, and it probably shows. Inside, Caroline and Pat – alongside much of the nation – were watching England somewhat erratically win the Ashes. Reminded me of how much I like the Australians.

Saturday, September 10, 2005

POSH PIGEONS

The Times today contains two items that link, in my mind at least. The first is an obituary of Richard Fitter, naturalist and author of books like Collins’ much-loved Pocket Guide to British Birds and The Pocket Guide to Wild Flowers. I met him in the 1970s through Max Nicholson, who I was working with in setting up Environmental Data Services (ENDS). But I wonder what he thought–and what Max, one of the country’s leading ornithologists, would have thought–of the astounding invasion of parakeets which is also covered in the newspaper today. We have watched them move into Barnes and the surrounding region over the years with a sense of wonder progressively shading into alarm.

The parakeets (apparently known in some parts of London as “posh pigeons”) are raucously present behind the house most days, and apparently are competing with a whole raft of native species, among them kestrels, little owls, nightingales and kingfishers. Ben Macintyre’s piece notes that people are losing patience with the gorgeously coloured birds and, among other things, shouting abuse at them. Given that parakeets are among the best mimics in the parrot world, I wonder how long it will be before the dawn chorus is mainly a matter of four-letter words?

Friday, September 09, 2005

Last couple of days spent in Zurich, at the Swiss Re Ruschlikon Centre for Global Dialogue, for the sixth International Sustainability Leadership Symposium. This year, the focus was on ‘The Market Value of Reputation’. I chaired a plenary panel session on the first day, with four speakers: Peter Forstmoser (Chairman, Swiss Re – they are more than a little embroiled in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina at the moment), Achim Steiner (Director General, IUCN – The World Conservation Union: he argued that the “Houston, we have a problem!” line is also true of economics, which is fundamentally flawed), Thierry Lombard (seventh generation private banker: “We are not good because we are old; we are old because we are good”) and Peter Quadri (Chairman, IBM Switzerland).

Good session and interesting event, but I came away feeling that much of the interest in corporate reputations is akin to navel-gazing, and that what we really need is a few more gales of creative destruction coupled with a much greater focus on entrepreneurial, disruptive solutions to the world’s great problems.

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

57 companies have been added–and 54 deleted–from the latest round of the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, where I am on the Advisory Board (http://www.sustainability-indexes.com). The assessments take account of such issues as corporate governance, climate change, supply chain standards and labour practices. Total assets under management in DJSI-based investment vehicles now amount to 3.3 billion euros ($4.1 billion). Among the key trends identified:

(1) Sustainability is continuing its move from corporate strategy and operations into product and service offerings. Advanced integration of eco-design requirements in the electronics industry, increasing implementation of environmental criteria in project financing and wider use of life cycle analysis in the chemcial industry are examples of this trend, say the DJSI team.

(2) Companies are converging around ‘first generation’ sustainability themes, such as corporate governance and environmental reporting. (Not sure I’d call corporate governance issues ‘first generation’, but let that pass.) The gap between leaders and laggards is opening out as the spotlight shifts to sector-specific issues such as healthy nutrition in the food industry, business opportunities for consumer goods in emerging markets, and anti-crime prevention in the financial sector.

(3) Transparency and accountability are spreading along supply chains, with greater use of environmental and social auditing processes.

(4) Sustainability indicators are increasingly linked to financial value drivers and integrated into Annual Reports, with new regulations, such as the UK’s Operating & Financial Review (OFR) requirement, helping to drive the trend.

(5) Corporations increasingly recognise the importance of human capital management for their success, although there is still felt to be great potential for improvement in areas like talent attraction, organizational learning and employee performance indicators.

Thursday, September 01, 2005

Spent the day in Rotterdam, giving a keynote for the 50th birthday celebration for Dow Benelux. Amazing to think back – as I did in my speech – to 1955, when I was 6 and 8 communist nations (including the USSR) signed the Warsaw Pact, when Churchill resigned as UK PM, and when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, was arrested, and triggered the Mongomery Bus Boycott.

The Dow event was held in the Ontwerpfabriek, now a UNESCO World Heritage site (http://www.ontwerpfabriek.nl/index.asp?pageid=259a31f7b82841bc9744b474b072fb66). Built between 1925 and 1931, it was once the highest of high tech. It used to house the Van Nelle tobacco, tea and coffee works, but now acts as an incubator for businesses in the world of design and similar. So we would have sessions in rooms with names like Havana, which is romantic but slightly edgy for a passionate non-smoker. The photos below give some sense of the space, style and environs. Stimulating in other ways, too, given that I’m thinking around the EU as an incubator of new global rules for our next Grist column.

When we later had dinner at a wonderful restaurant overlooking the harbour, or at least overlooking the back of an enormous naval auxiliary ship, I noticed that the vile maggot (or Macedonian leaf-miner, see 31 August entry) is abroad here, too.

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Every day I cycle in to the office, I pass the new David Backhouse ‘Animals at War’ memorial at Brook Gate, Park Lane (http://www.indielondon.co.uk/events/att_animals_warmemorial.html). It struck me more forcefully today after conversations we had yesterday at CFS in Manchester about animal welfare and animal testing. So I dismounted and took a few photos. It is thought that – to take just one species – 8 million horses died in WWI, so the memorial is richly deserved. But few other countries would erect such a thing. And, on the way back from Manchester, I reflected on the legal ban now in force on fox-hunting in this country, which I both support and yet in some odd way also regret. The thought stream was prompted by the sight of a great red dog fox sitting upright in the evening sun, alongside a canal.

HORSE CHESTNUT PLAGUE

Driving Gaia and a guitarist friend across to a concert in Putney earlier this week, she and I both noted that pretty much all the horse chestnut trees on the Common are in dire shape. Gaia said she thought a Macedonian moth was to blame, but promised to check on the Net and send a link. Here are three links she sent today for what turns out to be a real little horror.

It’s not quite The Day After Tomorrow in New Orleans and its environs, but CNN reports that, “survivors are facing dire conditions — no power, little drinking water, dwindling food supplies, gunfire in the distance — with no way to get out. And the waters are still rising, at times dotted by the bodies of those who perished when the hurricane roared into town Monday morning” (http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/08/31/katrina/).

SustainAbility has long argued that it would take one or more really major climate-related disasters in the US to begin to shift the Bush regime. Hurricane Katrina probably won’t be enough to swing things, but it will contribute to the steady drip-drip pressure on the climate Neanderthals. One key factor: unlike people in most of the areas hit by the tsunami, Americans tend to be insured. And that means big insurance bills — and major headaches for the reinsurers, who are already among the most vocal champions of more serious action on climate change. That is a central theme of SustainAbility’s latest report, The Changing Landscape of Liability (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/liability.asp), one of the sponsors for which was the international reinsurance giant, Swiss Re.

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

CFS stands for many different things around the world, among them Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Having known several people with this version of CFS, I know it’s no joking matter. But as something of a reptile myself, unable to stir until the sun is in the heavens, I felt more than a little dissociated from reality as I got up at 04.45 this morning to head up to Manchester, courtesy of Virgin Rail, and spend a day with CFS – as in Co-operative Financial Services. It was like a shot of adrenalin. The issues ranged from climate change to the risk of creating a genetic underclass. Part of the discussion focused on the future of reporting. In SustainAbility’s 2004 benchmark survey of corporate reporting, the latest CFS report came top (http://www.cfs.co.uk/servlet/Satellite?cid=1108109697271&pagename=CFSSustain/Page/tplCFSPageStandard&c=Page). But the two sessions I did with different CFS groups also woke me up to the longer term potential of a re-energised co-operative movement, if that could be achieved.

Monday, August 29, 2005

An ex-colleague, Nick Robinson, currently with BP, just sent me a link to a website I hadn’t come across, http://www.antiapathy.org/. We have been thinking about the fashion industry recently, largely because of its huge impact on other industries, and Anti-Apathy is active in that area. Anyone interested in this area might want to roll up for the Ethical Fashion Show on October 7-9, in Paris (http://www.ethicalfashionshow.com/index2.htm#).

Spent most of the long holiday weekend working, but the weather over the last couple of days has been glorious, the sky an extraordinary deep blue, the temptation to dawdle immense, but largely resisted. And the skies have had me thinking of fin whales and – in the wake of a piece I read in The Observer yesterday – about new ideas about life in space, alien life-forms. The fin whales came from today’s Times, which reports that fin whales, humpbacks and something like 2000 dolphins have been pursuing fish which have been pursuing plankton in warm currents reaching much further north than usual through the Irish Sea. Climate change, it seems, maybe also linked with Hurricane Katrina, which today just missed New Orleans.

And the skywhales? These are from a Channel 4 TV series (Alien Worlds) that will apparently begin on 4 October, alongside a new exhibition on the ‘Science of Aliens’ at London’s Science Museum (http:www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/aliens). They are reputed to live on Blue Moon, which has a super-dense atmosphere of oxygen and carbon dioxide. The ‘skywhales’ float through the soupy atmosphere on 10-metre wings, preyed on only by ‘caped stalkers’, eagle-like predators that sound like killer whales on amphetamines.

One of the questions raised by the Science Museum website’s alien section is whether someone out there is listening to us? As I sat down to file this blog, my Mac’s screen was dark, with the SETI at home scan running in the background. This uses down time on the computer to process signals received from deep space (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/). I haven’t seen any signs of intelligent life as yet, but having always loved whalesong (particularly as recorded many years ago by Roger Payne), I would quite like to hear skywhalesong.

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

With flood tides of data and information sluicing around the world, there is growing interest in visualisation techniques. That’s one reason why I have been experimenting with the notion of the ‘Value Palette’ (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/article.asp?id=322). And was fascinated to see a feature in the August issue of Wired on the work of New York artists Ingo Gunther. He and Worldprocessor (http://www.worldprocessor.com) plot data from newspapers and NGOs onto 12-inch plastic globes. Although the statistics are forever morphing, the impact of some of these globes is extraordinary.

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

COMING DOWN FROM SOLVENTS

Hania in repainted kitchen

Finally able to blog again, after further problems with hosting agency. Having taken a couple of weeks ‘off’ at home to concentrate on a range of writing projects, particularly the social enterprise book, I have found myself working as hard as ever on a range of SustainAbility and related projects. But, still, the writing projects have gradually been cranking through, and that in spite of the fact that I have been breathing a very heady, solvent-rich atmosphere for the past week. We have had our kitchen repainted, after twelve years, and there still seem to be limits to what you can achieve with water-based paints. But that’s something to look into again if and when a possible consumer-focused project we are discussing materialises.

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

PEOPLE TREE

Dinner last night with Safia Minney of fair trade fashion company People Tree (http://www.ptree.co.uk or http://www.ptree.co.jp), based in London and Tokyo, and her husband James and Elaine. Had met Safia some time back, via the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, and had interviewed her for SustainAbility’s Radar (http://www.sustainability.com/network/global-influencer.asp?id=258). Emerged re-enthused about SustainAbility’s long-standing idea of tackling the fashion sector as a ‘gatekeeper’ industry that sets the specifications (and, often, horrendous deadlines and pricing levels) that drive so many other industries, among them those producing fibres, textiles and a range of chemical products – including the pesticides used to protect crops like cotton and the dyes that may delight the eye but too often pollute the rivers of major producer countries like India.

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Three painters – one on his way shortly to Iraq as a member of the Territorial Army – are repainting our kitchen after 12 years. But the smell of solvents from the gloss areas has me wondering whether my enthusiasm for various projects during the day has had more to do with what I’ve been inhaling than with what I’ve been hearing. That said, one of the bits of goods news today came as a result of a teleconference Mark Lee and I had today with an editor of Grist (http://www.grist.org), the US electronic magazine. Unusually, they apply humo(u)r to the environmental challenge. Mark and I will be starting a new monthly column for Grist in the autumn.

Sunday, August 14, 2005

BARNES WETLANDS

Overblown dragonfly

Spend a quiet afternoon walking around the Barnes Wetland Centre with cousin Simon Mills and his family. Apart from a few edge-of-vision frogs and the usual birds, real wildfowl are relatively scarce, but the transformation wrought on these once-vast reservoirs is an extraordinary example of what can be done with imagination and determination. Every time I walk past the wonderful sculpture of Sir Peter Scott at the entrance, who drove the whole process, I can’t help but recall the times he helped me – particularly, when as a Trustee of The Winston Churchill Trust, he helped sway the panel towards awarding me a 1981 Fellowship, which I took in the US. And the visits I did during that period represented a big step towards my first Pelican, Sun Traps.

Friday, August 12, 2005

WIRELESS, AT LAST

Working at home this week on a bunch of writing tasks and future presentations, with a trip down to Oxford on Monday with Elaine for a session on SustainAbility’s future format. Today, a couple of IT engineers – one PC, one Apple – came to sort out longstanding issues with my home IT system, which is built around an Apple G4 desktop, one of the most exquisite bits of technology I have ever used. Turns out that the Hermstedt NetShuttle box I had bought some time ago was dysfunctional from the outset, whereas I had thought it was just my incompetence.

While I am constantly confounded by how far computers have come since I began using them in the late 1970s, from the perspective of 2010 it seems unbelievable that we still need engineers to sort out dysfunctional boxes, VPN connections and the like. Hopefully, tomorrow’s computers will be able to sort themselves out, with a dollop of artificial intelligence. In fact, only this morning, I was browsing through a book by John Edwards, The Geeks of War (Amacom, 2005) while waiting for the e-surgery to finish upstairs. If the military can have things like self-healing databases, which Edwards discusses, why oh why can’t we? The answer, of course, is that their budgets help develop such things, then they cascade through what’s left of the world at large.

Monday, August 08, 2005

SOLAR HOME

Drove to Oxford with Elaine, for session with Geoff (Lye) and Sophia (Tickell). Once again hugely impressed by Geoff’s solar home – which continuously informs you on how much electricity the house is using, how much is being captured by the solar panels, and how much is being bought from (or sold to) the national grid. The repayments from the power company may be somewhat token to date, but you catch a whiff of the future.

Geoff shows Elaine what’s watts

Sunday, August 07, 2005

TANGLEY

Caterpillar hedge

Peter, Eleo, me, Elaine

Elaine, Gaia and I drove down to Tangley, beyond Andover, to have lunch with age-old friends, Eleo Gordon and Peter Carson. Elaine and I had arrived to stay for two weeks with Eleo in her tiny Pimlico flat in the early 1970s, when I was at UCL, and ended up staying 18 months. Wonderful – if somewhat fitful – weather. Countryside looked idyllic, though the drive to and fro along the M3 was enough to persuade us that we are fundamentally urban creatures.

Driving in motorway lava streams drains me, whereas cycling to and from work recharges me. Got my bike back from the repair shop yesterday: one set of gears had collapsed, so they have put in new, stainless steel cables. The charge was very reasonable, given today’s labour costs, but it struck me that for not much more than three times the repair cost I could have bought some sort of new bike, made in Korea or China. But the huge amount I spent on the bike (a Dawes) over 15 years ago has repaid itself many times over, not least in standing up to a couple of major spills.

LEAVING SOCIAL FOOTPRINTS

Heard again yesterday from Mark McElroy, who is joining a team of researchers at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands for a three year project as Visiting Researcher. The ultimate ambition is to evolve a systematic methodology for computing ‘blended’ TBL (triple bottom line) scores for companies and others. Further details of his social footprint work from:http://www.sustainableinnovation.org/the-social-footprint.html

Saturday, August 06, 2005

One of the things I have been working on in recent weeks has been what I dub ‘The Value Palette’. As I have become more impatient with some of the reductionist ways of using triple bottom line (TBL) thinking, which we have been so instrumental in developing and spreading, my brain has been heading off in two related directions: the first towards greater integration across the TBL agenda of economic, social and environmental value added/destroyed, which pushes me in the direction of ‘Blended Value’ (www.blendedvalue.org); and the second is towards a much finer grain focus on the different forms of value that entrepreneurs, companies and investors will increasingly have to understand and blend.

And that’s where the Value Palette potentially comes in. It started of as a thought experiment which began to evolve in my mind as I was toying with an invited paper for the California Management Review – which I’m finishing off this weekend. It took a big jump forward when I bought and read John Gage’s Colour and Culture (Thames & Hudson, 1993/2001) while in Paris recently. And now it features in the latest issue of SustainAbility’s Radar (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/article.asp?id=322).

Saturday, July 30, 2005

AWAY DAYS

Jodie Thorpe and Brompton cycle

Much of the week has been taken up with a process of strategic reflection with the entire SustainAbility team. We started with all members of the team bringing something that spoke to them of the future: among them, Seb (Beloe) brought his Brompton cycle, Geoff (Lye) a picture of his new granddaughter, Jodie (Thorpe) a piece of string (she spoke of the need to manage the tension, ensuring there wasn’t so much that it snapped yet making sure there was enough so that we could play good tunes) and Kavita (Prakash-Mani) a snow leopard (shown in the picture), which she linked to a whole mass of themes, from the fact that it was an endangered species to the fact that it was ‘Made in China’.

I took the Vertical Speed Indicator from my father’s shot-down Hurricane (see 25 June entry), arguing the need to recall the security side of our agenda – and the growing need for tools that tell us where we are in terms of the climb towards sustainability.

One of my other inputs was a survey of our Council, Faculty and a small sample of clients and partners, which provided a hugely helpful mapping of the trends, risks and opportunities for us through to 2010. We are now planning to evolve the survey into a twice-a-year fixture, with the results posted and debated on the SustainAbility website.

Thursday, July 28, 2005

Jeff Erikson (who runs SustainAbility’s Washington, DC office) and I boarded a river boat at Butler Wharf this evening and sailed east down the Thames, celebrating the launch of a new bio-bottle for Belu, the ethical bottled spring water. Aboard: folk like Anita Roddick of The Body Shop and John Bird of The Big Issue. Caught up with a fair few people from the social enterprise world.

Belu’s new bottle is made from a polymer, polylactic acid (PLA), produced by NatureWorks (http://www.natureworksllc.com/corporate/nw_pack_home.asp), originally a joint venture between Dow Chemical and Cargill. SustainAbility did a stakeholder engagement process for them some time back, identifying only one major issue with PLA in the EU market: it is produced by fermenting corn – and corn in the US in now generally genetically modified. Against this, the profits from Belu’s products are invested in clean water projects in the developing world. And Belu say they are thinking of an ‘offset’ policy, ensuring an equivalent acreage of non-GM corn is grown.

Then Jeff and I walked back across Tower Bridge to catch the Tube west. The river looked beautiful, as did the Gherkin, poking up behind the Tower of London.

If anyone wanted an example of the value of diversity – human diversity – they would be hard placed to find a better illustration than the amazing successes of the Native American ‘code talkers’ used by American forces in WWI and WWII. Have long been fascinated by the story, which was brought back to mind by today’s obituary in The Times for Charles Chibitty, a Comanche code talker who served in Europe from the landings on Utah Beach through the liberation of at least one concentration camp (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1710775,00.html).

The code talkers used a language in radio transmissions which the Germans had no way of cracking. The bitter irony was that the US Government had for years tried to drive the Comanche tongue into extinction. Chibitty, too, was punished at school if he ever tried to speak his native language. One of the things I found most fascinating about the code talkers was the way they worked around the fact that their vocabulary had few words for modern warfare: they made terms up. When they wanted to refer to a machine-gun, for example, they spoke of a “sewing machine”. A tank became a “turtle” and a bomber a “pregant aeroplane”. Adolf Hitler was known as posah tai vo, Comanche for “crazy white man”.

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Enormously saddened to hear yesterday of the death of Marek Mayer, one of the foremost environmental journalists of his generation. Richard Macrory’s obituary appears in today’s Independent. Richard quotes me to the effect that when I first recruited Marek to Environmental Data Services (ENDS: http://www.ends.co.uk) he failed to produce much copy at all for the first six months – but then went critical, like a nuclear reactor, and thereafter poured forth a steady stream of very high quality, highly critical and profoundly influential coverage of the issues of the day.

As with Carol Crashaw, whose memorial service Elaine and I went to on Friday, there was an odd cross-connect here between Elaine’s world and mine. She knew Sue Gee (later Marek’s wife) via Wildwood House, the alternative publisher she worked with in Covent Garden in the early 1970s. (TEST, where I then worked, was on the top floor of the same building.) And it was through Sue that we heard of Marek when ENDS was looking for new talent. He took over from me as Editor of the ENDS Report in 1981, three years after we (David Layton, Max Nicholson and I) started the company, while I became Managing Director.

A key enabler was the Churchill Fellowship (http://www.wcmt.org.uk/) I received in 1981, which enabled me to travel to the US – and meant that Marek and Georgina McAughtry (the first ENDS team member, later a Director) had to take over in my absence. I left the company in 1983 to start the progression of activities that would lead to the founding of SustainAbility in 1987. And have felt profoundly grateful ever since to both Marek and Georgina not only for taking ENDS off my shoulders but also turning it into such a thundering success over the years.

Sunday, July 24, 2005

ADDER

As Elaine and I walked through the Swiss mountains last week, I would often take a look at the dung heaps and other decomposing mounds of agricultural waste in hope of seeing breeding snakes. No such luck. Then when we arrived in Little Rissington to see my parents a couple of days back, it was to hear that they had just found a large (for the species) adder in one of their compost heaps.

Can’t recall them being found so close in to the village before. But I do remember one very hot summer’s day maybe four decades ago when several of us walked up over the hill towards the RAF camp. There was a large field with a Cotswold stone barn along the way, which often sported a sign warning passers-by of adders. People tended to think it was a (largely unsuccessful) ruse to keep teenagers out of the barn. Then that afternoon, as we walked through the long grass, we saw adders and grass snakes curled up in pretty much every available nook in the hedgerow, sunning themselves, many intertwined with other snakes.

Saturday, July 23, 2005

CAROL CRAWSHAW

Elaine, Gaia and I drove up beyond Lancaster yesterday to the memorial service for Carol Crawshaw, who died while we were on holiday. Born the same year as I, 1949, she was an American who decided to make her life in the UK. I first met her when we both did an M. Phil. at UCL, 1972-74, but in one of those coincidences that so often seems to happen, Elaine already knew her husband, Robert, because they worked together at Oxford University Press (OUP).

One upshot of our meeting Carol was that Elaine and I moved into a small room she had been occupying with Eleo Gordon (later a Director of Penguin); we came to impose on Eleo’s hospitality for two weeks and stayed – in a bedroom the size of a broom cupboard and a flat which wasn’t much bigger – for 18 months.

Denied the chance to work in the Department of the Environment because of her nationality, Carol became a leading light in English tourism. Ferociously intelligent, quite competitive (American sense of ‘quite’) and hugely effective, she was someone I liked tremendously and respected hugely. Robert did perhaps the most extraordinary tribute I have ever heard, although Blair’s tribute to Princess Diana also comes to mind. Carol will be sorely missed.

The traffic we encountered on the way up and the way back, to Little Rissington where we stayed the night with my parents, reminded us of why we so rarely use our car.

Thursday, July 21, 2005

LONDON FROM THE GHERKIN

Geoff Lye and I spend part of the day with Swiss Re atop the ‘Erotic Gherkin’, with mind-bending panoramas during lunch across London. Overcast, so hard to take photos that do justice to spectacle. While waiting for our meeting, I had bumped into Sara Fox again: she ran the construction project. It’s amazing how visible the building is: I caught sight of its top floating above the trees as I cycled across Hyde Park this morning. Taken to and fro in a silver Mercedes: just as well, as someone has been detonating – or mis-detonating devices – in the Tube and on at least one bus again.

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

DAY TO REMEMBER

Finished a 5,500 word chapter for a Canadian book on Tube, a chapter I’m doing with Jodie (Thorpe) and Seb (Beloe). (Strangely, she also has contracts today for authors’ signature on two other chapters we have written for other books.) With the Piccadilly Line still out, am using the District Line when I can’t cycle. While the trip takes much longer, one gets to walk – from Temple – through bits of London which one doesn’t normally see. Wonderful.

Start with a session with the team on the latest issue of SustainAbility’s bi-monthly newsletter, Radar, following which I write a letter to the British Airways complaints department. Then off to Canary Wharf and ECGD, for the first meeting in my new role as Chairman of the ECGD Advisory Council. Main subject: corruption.

Then home, where I find a growing number of replies from our Council, Faculty and clients to an e-mail survey I sent out this morning, in preparation for SustainAbility’s away days next week. The two questions I asked were: What are the biggest risks for SustainAbility in the period through to 2010? And the biggest opportunities?

There was also an invitation to the 2006 World Economic Forum event in Davos. But the highlight of the evening came when I spotted that the third and final programme in the To the Ends of the Earth trilogy was showing on BBC2. Hadn’t seen the previous two, because we were in Switzerland. Benedict Cumberbatch, who played the lead role, is someone we know through a friend of the girls. I was totally blown away by his performance – and by the quality of the programme. A rising star.

Sunday, July 17, 2005

FOR BA, READ BALLSUP AIRLINES

Finally home, despite the best efforts of British Airways. How sad to see a great airline unravelling, as we now unquestionably are with BA. After decades of favouring BA, my experience of the last 12 months suggests an accelerating, spectacular spiral of decline in levels of service and quality in the UK’s national carrier. Nor is it just me: we heard the same message today from people from countries as far apart as Canada, the USA, Thailand and India.

Among recent symptoms, BA lost my bags on a flight to Melbourne, Australia. Nor was I traveling zoo class, as one Australian friend puts it: these days BA is just as ready to abuse you in Business Class. Yes Cathay Pacific mislaid the same bags a week or so later in Hong Kong, but they had a real excuse: they had to connect flights from Tokyo and to Beijing in the midst of a tropical rainstorm that had knocked Hong Kong’s airport for six.

Then, a week or so ago, BA added insult to injury by losing both our bags on the flight from Heathrow to Zurich. Now, adding insult to insult, they cancelled our flight from Zurich to Heathrow, and we were told we couldn’t be home for a further 24 hours, and would have to go via Paris.

And – at the risk of sounding like a Grumpy Old Man – as if that wasn’t enough to complain about, the customer service by BA at Zurich was scandalous. They didn’t announce they had problems with BA 717: instead, you had to pick it up from the screens. More or less at the head of the queue, we hoped to get a place on the other BA flight, 715, which (it hardly merits mentioning) was delayed by three hours, but like pretty much everyone else found this wasn’t possible.

No-one from BA turned up at any point to explain to the 50 or so people at the Transfers desk, who stood in line for many hours as they slowly processed a passenger every 30-40 minutes. Again there were no announcements or explanations. BA were very lucky not to have had a riot on their hands – and I wish their customer service people could have heard the ire among would-be passengers, some of whom would have been satisfied with just basic civility.

On current evidence, BA is developing something of a death wish. It seems hard to imagine, but I can now begin to see BA following Swiss Air into the vortex which ends in bankruptcy and forced rebranding. Any airline that takes the Union Jack as its emblem really ought to try harder. BA is in danger of becoming a national disservice.

Friday, July 15, 2005

IN PASSING

Two images shot in passing, as we walked today, the first truly sunny day of the holiday.

A Six-spot Burnet, says Sir Geoffrey Chandler

Thursday, July 14, 2005

AUSTRALASIA 2006

Elaine and I had a great breakfast session this morning in Vals with Murray and Dobrina Edmonds, who for many years now have helped us organise our missions to Australia and New Zealand – and, increasingly, Asia proper. We are already discussing the 2006 round, which will likely coincide with the international launch of SustainAbility’s latest Global Reporters benchmarking project.

Dobrina, me, Murray

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

ON FUTURE GENERATIONS

If sustainable development is about anything, it is about protecting the opportunities available to future generations. So the following sequence from James Meeks’ extraordinary book The People’s Act of Love struck a chord yesterday:

‘Who are you really?’ said Alyosha.

‘Destruction.’

‘Destruction of what?’

‘Of everyone that stands in the way of the happiness of the people who will be born after I’m dead.’

And this from a character who merits a place in The Silence of the Lambs. Then we walked up into the mountains today and simply looking at flowers like the pair shown below, from the Sempervivum (everliving) family, put it all in perspective. And the milk churns? Well they reminded me of the eternal cycles of life and death growing up on farms in Northern IIreland in the 1950s.

Monday, July 11, 2005

CHEZ ST JOHANNES BAPTISTA

A time of stone and water. The new thermal baths at the Hotel Therme, Vals, which we are using at least once a day, are constructed in the most beautiful stone. Perhaps not incidentally, across the valley there are several quarries where they periodically blast stone from the mountains. On our first day, as we walked along the valley’s opposite flank, there was a big rolling bang that could have been thunder or a Swiss airforce jet breaking the sound barrier, but then a plume of dusty smoke rose from the flank of a nearby hill.

This morning Elaine and I walked up the mountain behind the hotel to a small chapel dedicated to St Johannes Baptista. Last time we came across his trail was in Damascus, where his reputed head is reputed to lie in a small chapel inside the unbelievably beautiful Ummayad Mosque. The little chapel here, though, is every bit as dramatic, with spectacular views across the valley to a tumbling waterfall – albeit in peripheral vision you can’t help spotting the large factory in which the local water is bottled under the ‘Valser’ label.

Elaine and chapel

Therme 1

Therme 2

Therme 3

Chapel and waterfall

TERROR IN A TUBE

Some thoughts stimulated by the 7 July London Transport attacks follow. They will be edited when I get back to London.

Now terror comes in a Tube. And terrible though the events of 7 July were, and not for a moment wanting to discount the long-term effects on the physical and mental health of survivors and of the families and friends of the victims, it has to be said: whatever the ultimate death toll, London got off relatively lightly this time. There will be other attempts on mass transit systems like London’s Underground. Some will succeed, on a much greater scale.

So-called ‘asymmetry’ in the distribution of political and military power more or less guarantees further growth in terrorism-related activities. In parallel, the war in Iraq, right or wrong, is proving to be a highly fertile breeding ground for future generations of terrorists – or freedom fighters, if you prefer. As a child exposed to the internecine hatreds and tensions of places like Northern Ireland, Cyprus and Israel, I was forced to recognise early that the sort of hatreds currently being stirred have been around for generations – and will continue to cascade through the generations.

Meanwhile, modern terrorism increasingly finds itself in a ‘target-rich’ environment. Consider these simple facts: Demographic trends are driving huge numbers of people into the world’s burgeoning mega-cities. There they are best served by mass transit systems. At the same time, the weapons of terror are getting ever-more powerful and portable. Some people are perfectly happy dying alongside their victims. And even where they are not, there are plans to install cell phone systems in subways, systems of the sort that helped trigger the Madrid bombs.

There are many implications of all of this, not least because – in contrast to London’s Blitz and V-weapon ordeals of the 1940s – it is much less clear these days where the bombs are coming from. Who now do we blame? Who do we begin to mistrust? And who do we expect to provide solutions? I expect increasingly high-energy links between already volatile areas like security, identity and human and civil rights.

Are there links to sustainable development? Yes, indeed too many to list. But here are a few. Democracy, in its various forms, depends on at least a degree of trust among the peoples living alongside one another – and our definitions of ‘alongside’ are being continuously stretched by entities like the EU, by overseas travel and by the Internet. Capitalism, in its various forms, depends on ‘low friction’ access, mobility and transport systems, implying a minimum of traditional security intrusions. And our capacity to think long term, always in precariously short supply, is little helped by concerns that we may not survive the journey to work.

Several of the e-mails I received in the aftermath of the bombings expressed total surprise about what has just happened. That fact itself should surprise us. Let’s be clear: this was inevitable. The twenty-first century will see more such attacks. Their sophistication and scale will grow. So will the casualty lists. ‘Big Brother’ solutions will be proposed and, I fear, citizens will often accept constraints on their civil liberties that would once have seemed unimaginable.

Few skills are as critical in ensuring a sustainable future as the art of foresight. We cannot afford to be taken totally by surprise in terms of mass transit security, but many people will be. Even less can we risk being surprised by the enormously greater scale of the environmental, social, economic and political shockwaves that will follow the sorts of climate change now thought inevitable in the coming decades. But, again, many of us will be.

No doubt the Bush administration’s skeptics will express great ‘surprise’ when climate change really gets its claws in. So let’s spell it out. The evidence suggests that we are our immediate descendants will live in an increasingly unstable natural environment. Unstable natural environments mean unstable economies. Unstable economies mean unstable societies. Unstable societies create perfect breeding grounds for future rounds of insurgency and counter-insurgency. And – this is where the cycle becomes particularly vicious – such conditions make it increasingly unlikely that effective strategies will be developed for ensuring stable environments.

We owe it to the victims of New York, Madrid, Baghdad, London and a growing list of cities, towns and villages to ensure that we consciously and effectively work to break this vicious cycle – rather than using their deaths as an excuse to accelerate it.

Sunday, July 10, 2005

FROGS

We walk slowly, thoughtfully this afternoon in the drizzle and rain, along the river bank. The mountains wear swirling boas of cloud, the peaks winking in and out of view. We pass an algally challenged pond around which there are signs suggesting the presence of salamanders and the like. The thing looks rather like an aquatic version of the abandoned mini-golf course a little further along the same bank, but the grass around the pond and nearby marshy ground is alive with froglets. Restorative.

Saturday, July 09, 2005

HAY SOUP

Zerfreilahorn 1 Zerfreilahorn 2

Dam

Reservoir turns corner

Wildflowers

Apparently carvivorous caterpillar pretending to be a curled-up leaf

The death toll in London continues to mount: 49 last time I looked. And it’s getting closer: one e-mail today mentioned someone in an organisation we know who was in the King’s Cross area and has now been missing for three days. But, though it’s terrible to say, it could have been infinitely worse. The investigators are now saying that the bombs may have been the work of local terrorists, because they weren’t particularly sophisticated. At some point, someone is going to have a sophisticated go.

With e-mails continuing to come in from places like Wales, California, Nepal, China and Japan, from people wondering how we are, we feel an umbilical connection to the news events, but are also trying to unhook to some degree.

So a day of swimming and walking around the man-made lake above Vals. Wonderful flowers and wildlife, including a vole which briefly communed with Elaine. Am also reading – and hugely enjoying – a new book by James Meek, The People’s Act of Love. Published by Canongate, where Gaia’s great friend Francis Bickmore works. She was completely taken over by it. Francis, who is credited in The People’s Act, was the man who found the original submission for The Life of Pi in Canongate’s ‘slush pile’.

This evening, Elaine was so tired that she hovered between consciousness and sleep throughout dinner, despite the fact that we were served such things as Vallser Hay Soup and Olive Oil Ice Cream. The hay, which is being gathered into the small barns here between the rainstorms, smells heavenly. Wouldn’t easily have thought of making it into soup, but it worked wonderfully well.

Friday, July 08, 2005

Not quite Gene Kelly, but last night – at the end of a day in which mobile phone calls and e-mails poured in literally from around the world asking how we (family and SustainAbility team) were – Elaine and I went swimming in the thermal pools here in Vals. Swimming in the rain. There are many pools to choose from – indoor and outdoor pools, Fire Pool, Ice Pool, Flower Pool, Flower Pool and so on. This was around 23.00, in the outdoor pool, with the raindrops kicking up reverse images of themselves in the luminous water. The pool was illuminated from underneath, which made the swirls kicked up by one’s feet look like boiling liquid crystal.

The waitress earlier this evening, from East Germany, near Dresden, asked whether we were from London? Told that we were, she expressed her sympathy. After what the RAF and USAF did to Dresden during the latter stages of WWII, this struck me as particularly big-hearted. Perhaps coincidentally, just down the slope from the hotel and on the way to the river, we pass a Trabant on our walks, a squat reminder of the very different world that intervened between 1945 and 1989.

Thursday, July 07, 2005

7/7

The first we knew of the London bombings – Elaine and I have just arrived in Vals, Switzerland – was when Gaia called to say she and Hania were OK. Extraordinarily touching how many e-mails I have had today from different parts of the world to check whether we and the team were still among the living. Answer, on all counts so far as I can determine, is yes.

Even though as I write the death count stands at 33, I can only say it’s a relief that it isn’t way higher. I have been expecting an attack on the Tube for years, indeed have often warned of the danger. But what to do? Even now we know of the risk, what are those responsible for running the Underground to do? In the end, we are going to have trade off freedom of movement against the risks of terrorist attacks. But it does make me think that (post Madrid) Elaine’s constant concerns about ever allowing cell phones to be used on the Tube are well placed.

Interesting to ponder the 21st century prospect. As more and more people live in mega-cities, which are best served by public transport, particularly mass transit systems like the Tube, the risks of terrorist mass murders grows almost exponentially. Can’t help but think that the Tokyo sarin attacks, the Madrid bombings and now 7/7 are just the stuttering beginnings of a long-running saga.

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

GAYLORD NELSON

Wildlife, of sorts, abounds even in London: last night, for example, I was woken by the screaming of foxes and this morning I awoke to the shrieks of the parakeets that are taking over the skies here. Even the vile lamprey has taken up lodgings a few blocks from here in the Thames, which is a sign of a clean river, apparently.

Someone who did a great deal to drive forward the conservation and environmental agenda, Gaylord Nelson, is obituarised in today’s Times. He was 89. I first heard of him many years ago via Denis Hayes, who I saw again a few weeks back in Seattle. They had worked together on the first Earth Day in 1970. “The reason Earth Day worked,” Nelson is quoted as saying, “is that it organised itself.”

Well, up to a point. The organisation may have been catalytic rather than command-and-control, but it worked wonders. I still recall the extraordinary enthusiasm of the young team in Palo Alto who helped Denis organise the 1990 Earth Day, which went truly international for the first time – and for which I served on the international board. Sad, though, that Nelson died in the wake of yet another series of Republican roll-back of so many of the environmental advances he and his colleagues had achieved.

Monday, July 04, 2005

Among other things, am continuing to work on the book on social entrepreneurs with Pamela Hartigan of the Schwab Foundation (www.schwabfound.org). Interesting to see that on 28 June, in New York, Kristine Pearson, executive director of the Freeplay Foundation (www.freeplayfoundation.org) and a Schwab Foundation social entrepreneur, participated in the ringing of the opening bell at the NASDAQ Stock Exchange in Times Square, along with a group of ten Tech Museum Award laureates. Meredith Taylor, president of the Tech Museum, singled out the Freeplay Foundation’s work in Africa with orphans to illustrate the importance of technology benefiting humanity. The picture is of Kristine on the giant NASDAQ plasma sign. The Foundation is linked to Freeplay, run by Rory Stear, another Schwab Foundation social entrepreneur.

Sunday, July 03, 2005

Spent several hours writing articles for Nikkei Ecology and Grist, but for most of the day I watched the London Live 8 concert agog. To my mind, the Sixties bands pretty much blew every one else off the stage: The Who, the reformed Pink Floyd, McCartney and U2. And Sting, with his “We’ll Be Watching You,” with the G8 leaders in the background. But maybe that’s just age. I was also impressed by Madonna, Joss Stone, Annie Lennox and – though I don’t like their music – Velvet Revolver. Now we shall see what effect all of this has on the “eight men in a room” next week. But hats off to Geldof: what an extraordinary achievement.

Saturday, July 02, 2005

Cycling home last night, through fitful drizzle, I joined a number of cyclists cycling around the edges of the Live 8 concert area of Hyde Park. Would have been up in Edinburgh this weekend for SustainAbility’s G8 event, but we had a board meeting today. Sophia (Tickell), one of our non-executive directors, was wearing the white band. If any readers haven’t yet signed up for the Live 8 campaign, it’s easy to do at http://www.live8live.com/whatsitabout/index.shtml.

When I got home, Gaia and Hania had cooked a dinner in celebration of my recent birthday, and among their presents were two CDs by Madeleine Peyroux. Careless Love, in particular, is extraordinary.

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

NORMAL SERVICE …

Apologies. The host company for this website has managed to lose 40-50 of the photographs over the past week or so. We are doing our best to get back to the status quo ante – and to ensure, as far as possible, that this sort of meltdown doesn’t happen again. These days I use the website a fair amount to track down dates and contacts, so it has been a bit like – though I really shouldn’t say this – early onset Alzheimer’s.

DRENCHED

Cycle to and from the office today for the first time in ages, because of air travel and other constraints. Amazing sense of recharge. My eyes, though, come up in some form of allergic reaction to pollen or somesuch. Day of stakeholder interviews with Unilever, plus work on blended value paper for California Management Review. Then home, with the heavens opening as I cross Hammersmith Bridge. Even though I periodically take shelter under trees, I arrive home soaked. But, again, with lighting flashing the sky, it’s all quite invigorating.

Saturday, June 25, 2005

VERTICAL SPEED INDICATOR

Age-eaten vertical speed indicator atop pristine book cover

Jude the Obscure: dangerous rose

First, across to lunch with David Grayson in Kennington. Typically, I forget the address and instructions on how to get there, and am only saved by the fact that David comes out to greet another guest and spots us passing. Then Elaine and I drive down to the Cotswolds to stay with my parents at Hill House.

During the stay my father, Tim, gives me the vertical speed indicator recovered by archaeologists from the Hurricane in which he was shot down in 1940. It’s amazing how Meccano-like the workings are behind the dial. The tin or aluminium face is eaten away by either water or by the fire that engulfed the machine 65 years ago. Some sense of where the instrument came from can be got from the following image (http://www.historicaircraftcollection.ltd.uk/images/hurricane_02.jpg), where it is found on the top right of the four dials around the aircraft’s control column.

While walking around the Hill House garden, I am taken – once again – by the scent of one rose, Jude the Obscure. One of the flowers later turns up on the kitchen table. The rose also turns out to be the one that savaged Tim a while back, when he fell into it. His arms still show the bloody scratches. They’re all out to get him. If it isn’t the Luftwaffe, it’s flowers.

Thursday, June 23, 2005

TIM O’RIORDAN

Spend my fifty-sixth birthday in Norwich, at the University of East Anglia, at a conference on governance and sustainability. The event, at ZICER (Zuckerman Institute of Connective Environment Research, www.uea.ac.uk/zicer/) is in honour of the impending retirement of a long-time colleague and friend (and a member of SustainAbility’s Faculty), Professor Tim O’Riordan (http://www.uea.ac.uk/env/cserge/people/tim_o).

Stunning evening and dinner at the Cathedral, or at least in the newly built refectory alongside. One of the most successful examples I have seen of the integration of deeply historic architecture and sympathetic modern building. Tim plays double bass in a small orchestra playing Mozart and Elgar. Spend much of the evening talking with Jonathon Porritt and Angela Wilkinson (of Shell) about prospects for next 15-20 years, arguing that we are likely to see at least one discontinuity on the scale of 1929.

Tim on double bass

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

SLOWLY LEADING THE WORLD?

Bevy of meetings, including an unexpectedly fascinating one with Stephen Jordan of the American Chamber of Commerce (http://www.uschamber.com/ccc) Corporate Citizenship Center and another with Unilever as part of a stakeholder process SustainAbility is doing for them. In between times, I drafted an article on the energy prospect for Chevron, which Jeff Erikson in our DC office had asked me to do last night.

Then on to the Sustainable Development Commission’s ‘Leading the World?’ pre-G8 summit event. Jonathan Dimleby chaired, Jonathon Porritt (who chairs the SDC) concluded, and the weather steamed. Somewhat frustrating process, but the evening ended with a slow food dinner which drove home many of the sustainability points the evening’s speakers had been trying to make at a more abstract level. This part of the event was organised by Slow Food UK (http://www.slowfoodfoundation.com): wonderful people presenting wonderful food.

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

WSBF CSR FORUM

Started the day in Westminster, speaking at a conference organised by the Westminster Sustainable Business Forum (www.wsbf.org.uk). Founded in October 2004 by Networking for Industry (NFI), the Forum is focusing on such areas as business ethics, climate change, corporate social responsibility, green procurement and public/private partnerships. Good turn-out, interesting people but the first session ran way over, so my presentation time was cut in half. With Richard (Lord) Holme in the chair, I did it on the fly and raced on for a lunch with Shell people – which was enormously interesting in terms of wider trends in our field.

Monday, June 20, 2005

NEW ECGD ROLE

After meeting with Innocent Drinks, I head across to Canary Wharf for meeting of the advisory council of Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD). This is Liz Airey’s last meeting as Chair of the advisory council – and my appointment as her successor in the role is press-released today (http://www.ecgd.gov.uk/news_home.htm?id=6543).

INNOCENT RUMINATIONS

My udder van is …

After (separate) meetings in the office on Shell and Microsoft, and with the sky rocked with thunder, I streak westwards to Hammersmith for a meeting with Jon Wright of Innocent Drinks (http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk). Having already been seduced by their smoothies and their vehicles (http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/us/us.html), I was keen to see whether they would fit into our blended value piece for California Management Review. Mercifully, particularly after a fast-paced walk to meet co-founder Jon Wright at ‘Fruit Towers’, all of this through conditions worthy of Kuala Lumpur, I find that they do.

Saturday, June 18, 2005

PARISIAN REFLECTIONS

Paris, by Eurostar yesterday morning. Last night we had dinner with David Vogel, who edits the California Management Review, and his wife Virginia. Am writing him a paper on different forms of value, with Jed Emerson and Seb Beloe. Today my brain is playing with colours, so a walk around Paris today with Elaine turned into a sequence of reflections on the spectrum, colours and reflections. We walked around the Rive Gauche, including the Musee d’Orsay, then up to Montmartre by Metro to see a strange but interesting Dali exhibition, then back to Rive Gauche. Glorious weather.

Dripping paint

Crabs

Elaine and womannequin

Two heads

Woman looking out towards Montmartre

Shadow puppets

Three mannequins

Dancer

Gilded chairs

Wednesday, June 15, 2005
BSR UP BT TOWERInteresting evening session with Business for Social Responsibility (BSR – http://www.bsr.org), co-hosted by BT, in the BT Tower complex. Before the roundtable started, we all trooped up to the top of the tower to look out over London, a nice parallel for what corporate boards increasingly need to do – get the big picture, the 360-degree view. One striking thing about the view from the top of this eyrie: how small the distant City looked, for all its financial power.

The theme of the session was the need for convergence between the corporate governance and corporate (social) responsibility agendas. One interesting sign of the times: Dr Chris Tuppen, who has handled the environmental, social and sustainability agendas for BT since at least the early 1990s, has now moved into the Company Secretary’s office.

View from BT Tower east towards the City

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

BLOWING IN THE WIND: HITLER

Finished reading Until the Final Hour, Traudl Junge’s account of her time as Hitler’s secretary. Used as basis of the film Downfall. Astounding. So much is in the detail, like the mention of the wife of Baldur von Schirach (her name isn’t given) who asked Hitler at tea-time about the rumours of the tribulations of the Jews deported from Amsterdam. Painful silence. Hitler gets to his feet and withdraws. “Apparently she had exceeded her rights as a guest and failed to carry out her duty of entertaining Hitler,” says Traudl. Then, towards the end of the story, the suicides in the bunker. “The most powerful man in th Reich a few days ago, and now a little heap of ashes blowing in the wind.”

Monday, June 13, 2005

MOLLY & MARCH

Wonderful evening at Cafe Fish, near Piccadilly Circus, with Elaine, Molly March (who I first met in Cyprus in the late 1950s: see Cyprus link on homepage, http://johnelkington.com/pubs-unpublished-cyprus.htm), her daughter March, March’s friend Mark, and March’s father, Nick Hutchinson.

Before heading across there, I dropped into Virgin records to get Ry Cooder’s latest album, Chavez Ravine. A “post World War II era American narrative of ‘cool cats, radios, UFO sightings, J. Edgar Hoover, red scares, and baseball’, the CD is a tribute to the erstwhile Los Angeles Latino enclave known as Chavez Ravine, bulldozed by developers in the 1950s in the process of building the Dodgers Stadium. Also bought a best-of compilation of Ringo’s All Starr Band (had been struck by his rendition of ‘Photograph’ during the ‘Concert for George’ celebration of the life and work of George Harrison) and the first CD from The Magic Numbers, which was playing as I was paying.

Amazing the impact music has: Molly and I talked about the Beach Boys, who we both woke up to in the early 1960s, and about skateboarding. She used an ironing board atop some old roller skates. When I used to skateboard at Bryanston, our boards’ wheels used to seize solid every time they hit a piece of grit, resulting in several chips out of my teeth. Odd coincidence: Nick went to Bryanston, too. Molly had recently met four ex-Bryanstonians. I asked her what she saw as the common characteristics. Confident, questioning, humorous, she began, and I stopped her before the list went negative!

The trigger for the Beach Boys discussion was that I had watched The Beach Boys: An American Family yesterday on Channel 5, directed by Jeff Bleckner and first released in 2000. Highly engaging – and surprisingly accurate – profile.

Molly March, me, Cafe Fish

Molly, me, March, Nick

Saturday, June 11, 2005

GAIA GOES WEST

Gaia and Hania here overnight, ahead of driving to Somerset for a party. Snap Gaia in her feathers in front of a painting that Elaine and I bought many, many years ago, which reminded me of the heights of the Aztec and Inca eras. So something of a clash of eras, but I thought the reds went together nicely.

Friday, June 10, 2005

GEORGE BUSH: AMERICAN CYCLOPS

What follows is a piece that popped into my head – more or less fully formed – at 03.00 in the morning after I flew back from Seattle. Intemperate, maybe. And some of my colleagues say that the real issue is how the sustainability movement can work with right-wingers. Well, maybe. But I feel increasingly angry at the extraordinary damage that George Bush and his colleagues are doing to the reputation of America, around the world. And I am also dumbstruck by the idiocy of much current American foreign policy. Europe, to put it mildly, is not without its idiocies, but – for better or worse – the US current has the greater global responsibilities, not least because it has taken them upon itself. Let the piece stand as a matter of record:

GEORGE BUSH II: AMERICAN CYCLOPS

The future of the United States is increasingly threatened by the monocular vision of its President.

In the unlikely event that the head of President George W. Bush ever appears among the giant presidential sculptures of Mount Rushmore, it is increasingly – worryingly – obvious that he would best be rendered as an American Cyclops. It is also clear that his aggressively monocular vision, powerfully inflamed by the 9/11 attacks, endangers the future both of his own country and, to a degree, much of the rest of the world.

On the threshold of a new century, and very much like the original Cyclops described by Euripides around 408 B.C.E., George W. Bush stands in the mouth of the world he knows, still enraged, blinded and desperate to capture the intruder who thrust the “blinding brand” into his face. Wait a moment, you may say: it is Osama bin Laden who (if he still lives) who is hiding out in caves, not the President of the world’s current hyper power. True, but caves come in many forms, some self-imposed.

Maybe it was inevitable that the Clinton administration’s sticky-fingered interest in exploring every last aspect of any area of policy would produce an opposite and at least equal reaction. Whatever, the troglodytic reflexes of the current administration were again exposed with the New York Times leak of papers showing how Philip Cooney – chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality – repeatedly intervened to water down and subvert the conclusions of scientific reports on the likely impacts of climate change (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/politics/08climate.html).

Caveman politics

We can argue about the scale of the problem, but the underlying pattern is clear. Whether it involves deciding war and then force-fitting the facts to provide a strategic case or airbrushing the science where it is likely to offend the delicate sensibilities of the President and his funders, this is a caveman administration that finds anything approaching binocular vision unsettling.

You need look no further than its own staffing policy. It is surely no accident that Cooney – who seems happy to wade into the scientific debate without having himself any form of science background – is a former oil industry lobbyist. Much of his job seems to have involved inserting the words “significant and fundamental” every time he saw the words “uncertainties” in reports and policy papers on climate change.

Destructively, the Bush administration seems to be boxed in both by its own ideology and by the narrow self-interest it has consciously set out to promote among ordinary Americans. As a result, growing numbers of American citizens and voters are afflicted by an increasingly pernicious form of tunnel vision. A question worth asking: Are we seeing the early stages of America once again retreating into its shell? One litmus test of this trend will be what happens with Ford and GM. Toyota chairman Hiroshi Okuda has been fretting in public that the collapse of the Big Two Detroit auto-makers into their current junk bond status could trigger U.S. moves against foreign auto-makers. A couple of months back he even suggested that Japanese auto-makers should try to help Ford and GM by raising the price of cars sold in the U.S.!

Naturally there are also some hopeful signs. Whether you walk around the streets of San Francisco or around Microsoft’s car-parks in Redmond, on the leafy outskirts of Seattle, you will see surprising numbers of Toyota’s Prius hybrid cars. People are buying them because they are wonderfully fuel efficient a time when gas prices are soaring, but also – they say – because they look ‘cool’.

At last Japanese auto designers have grasped something that Apple’s Steve Jobs has long known: design sells – and it can sell sustainable products, not just unsustainable ones. But for the moment it is clear that most Americans remain cocooned in their glistening SUVs, their ears lulled with their iPod comforters, all blissfully unaware of just how different the twenty-first century will be to the twentieth, dubbed by Harold Evans and others as ‘The American Century’. Like all incumbents, their very success has blinded them to how fast the world can change.

The second Republican Cyclops?

Having arrived in the U.S. after a 5-country tour that took in South Korea, Japan and China, I had momentarily returned to London en route thinking that Tom Friedman’s recent book The World Is Flat may even understate the scale of the longer term threat – economic, political and perhaps most fundamentally cultural – to U.S. hegemony in each and all of these areas. And while the politics of the cities of the U.S. and Canadian west coasts tend to much more progressive than in these countries’ heartlands, the mood I found in the U.S. worried me profoundly.

No-one disputes that there are Cyclopean – or should it be Cycloptic? – tendencies in Europe or in countries like China. But at the moment what happens in the U.S. is likely to be crucial in shaping the policy agenda for the next decade or so. When the Cyclops metaphor first flashed into my mind on the flight back to Heathrow from Seattle it seemed to capture the almost mythic scale of the changes now under way. But before deciding to use it, the reptilian part of my brain wondered whether someone else had already laid claim to the phrase ‘American Cyclops’? Googling, I discovered that, once again, there is not much new under the sun.

That said, the main reference dated back to1868, when James Fairfax McLaughlin used it to headline a satirical attack on Ben Butler, the ‘Black Republican’ Union Civil War general – and a notorious carpet bagger. Butler’s high-handed rule in New Orleans and elsewhere in the South in 1862 earned him the sobriquet ‘Beast’ and soon had him removed from office. Today, with reports of systematic torture in Iraq and elsewhere, alongside the twenty-first century forms of carpet-bagging practiced by the likes of Halliburton (contrast http://www.halliburtonwatch.org or http://www.corpwatch.org with http://www.halliburton.com), George Bush II seems well down the same slippery slope.

So how, in God’s name, did Bush II get back into office with a significantly improved majority? Among the more convincing answers to the question is that proposed by University of California professor of linguistics George Lakoff. On a visit to San Francisco earlier in the year, I came across his work on the framing of social issues with the Rockridge Institute (http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org) – and after reading his book, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values, Frame the Debate, suggested it should be required reading for all my colleagues at SustainAbility. Or, at least, Lakoff’s four key points on the uses – and the many abuses by those driving the current Republic agenda – of framing in politics (http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/projects/strategic/simple_framing/view).

Perfect Storm, 2016

And just in case all of this seems comfortably remote, perhaps I can commend one other recent (and fairly mind-warping) article. In the July/August issue of The Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows posits a “perfect storm” in which the U.S. economy implodes. Among the factors that come together to collapse the economy and drive a complete outsider into the Presidency in 2016 were: the frailty of the relationship between the U.S. and China (which had essentially been bankrolling the U.S. deficit for years); the fourth – and worst – oil shock; a run on the dollar; a tsunami of bankruptcies; the evaporation of lifetime savings; and a domino effect cascading through every level of government funding.

For me, one of the most credible outcomes – though no doubt Hiroshi Okuda would prefer that this wasn’t noised abroad – was the take-over of Ford and GM by Toyota. As Fallows puts it, the 2012 takeover had a grim inevitability. “Over the previous decade,” he writes, “the two U.S. companies had lost money on every car they sold. Such profit as they made was on SUVs, trucks, and Hummer-style big rigs. In 2008, just before the oil shock, GM seemed to have struck gold with the Strykette- an adaptation of the Army’s Stryker vehicle, so famous from Iraq and Pakistan, whose marketing campaign attracted professional women. Then the SUV market simply disappeared. With gasoline at $6 a gallon, the prime interest rate at 15 percent, and the stock and housing markets in the toilet, no one wanted what American car makers could sell. The weak dollar, and their weak stock prices, made the companies a bargain for Toyota.”

Fallows foresees an end to 164 years of two-party rule in the US. The new President, an independent, is taking over from a military hero, the man who famously captured Osama bin Laden in the Saudi Arabian desert in 2011 – and who was elected to the presidency in 2012. The challenge, as it is laid out in a brief for the incoming President, is three-fold:

“Our country no longer controls its economic fundamentals.
“Compared with the America of the past, it has become stagnant, classbound, and brutally unfair.
“Compared with the rest of the world, it is on the way down. We think we are a great power – and our military is still ahead of China’s. Everyone else thinks that over the past twenty years we finally pushed our luck too far.”

The optimist in me tries to believe that the U.S. will once again be spurred to action by the urgency of the threats. But, like climate change, the very nature of many of the challenges that blend into that perfect storm less than a decade from now are that they build slowly and often imperceptibly. Without clear-eyed political leadership, the bleak scenario seems increasingly likely. And the implications for the rest of the world, increasingly hooked onto the U.S. economy, are equally dire.

Hold on, Arnie’s coming

Of course, there are bright spots against the gloom – and not simply those sun-hazed Priuses as you walk around Microsoft’s parking lots. For one thing, there’s ‘The Terminator’. On June 1st, for example, as part of the UN’s World Environment Day celebrations, Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vowed to tackle global warming in the state. He declared the debate on climate change “over”, announcing a climate change plan with targets to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to 2000 levels by 2010, 1990 levels by 2020, and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. If all goes to plan, the 2010 target equates to an 11% reduction on business-as-usual.

It’s supremely ironic that the man driving progressive politics in the sunshine state is a Republican. As the Climate Group notes, the messages emanating from the Governor’s office reinforce the progressive policy measures both in place and in development in California, covering sectors from power generation through to transport.

“For example,” the Climate Group reports, “California state lawmakers recently passed the Pavley Bill, which will reduce greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles put on the market from 2009. These regulations are expected to cut greenhouse gas emissions from new cars by 30% by 2016. And in 2002, the state implemented a Renewables Portfolio Standard stating that renewable energy must be the source of 20% of the electricity sold by 2017. In his speech, the Governor pledged to accelerate this commitment to 20% by 2010 and 30% by 2020.”

Significantly, a key message at the heart of Governor Schwarzenegger’s speech was that these measures, and the new targets, will not compromise economic growth, rather they will promote innovation and business opportunities in the state. As he stressed said, “together we can meet the needs of both our economy and the environment. Together we can continue California’s environmental heritage and legacy of leadership in innovation in cutting-edge technology.”

Nor is Governor Schwarzenegger alone in spotting the emerging opportunity space. The recent unveiling by General Electric Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt of the company’s new ‘Ecomagination’ strategy has won widespread praise. The company has pledged to spend $1.5 billion a year on such research by 2010, more than double the $700 million it spends currently.

Immelt also noted that GE aims to double the revenue goal over that period for products that provide better environmental performance, to $20 billion a year, and expects more than half of its product revenue to come from such products by 2015. At the same time, GE promises to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of its factory operations 1 percent by 2012. Without the initiative, those emissions were expected to increase 40 percent, GE said.

Gearing down

But even an optimist must admit that there is a very large fly in this ointment. Having devoted nearly thirty years of my life to opening up business to the market risks and opportunities created by sustainable development in general, and by environmental issues like climate change in particular, it is increasingly clear to me that governments will need to play a central role in shaping twenty-first century markets.

Indeed, this is a line we pursued in a recent report for the UN Global Compact, Gearing Up: From Corporate Responsibility to Good Governance and Scaleable Solutions (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/scalingup.asp). And it’s also a key reason why SustainAbility has focused on corporate lobbying in recent years, most recently with a review of the level of transparency public policy positions among the world’s biggest 100 companies – the subject of a report due out at the end of June.

Jeffrey Immelt has also waded into the debate, noting that he would like the U.S. Congress to pass an energy bill setting “clear milestones” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – so that companies would know clearly how to invest to achieve them. The bill should include market-based mechanisms to encourage businesses to cut pollution, such as caps with incentives or the ability to trade emissions credits, he said.

But the current signals from White House – or Cyclops’ Cave – are pretty clear, and leave little room for optimism. Someone I met while in Seattle is Denis Hayes, co-founder of the Earth Day movement in 1970 (http://www.earthday.org) and now President of the Bullitt Foundation (http://www.bullittfoundation.org). When I first met him, in 1981, he was still running the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI: now the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, http://www.nrel.gov), which had just heard that newly elected President Ronald Reagan was going to defenestrate him and hack away at SERI’s budget. Having survived one axeman Republic president, he now worries that the Republicans seem set on creating financial crises that force the closure or castration of many key environmental programs.

Some caveman politicians will never get over the run-for-the-bunkers mentality shaped by the Cold War. But, as Hayes noted in a recent column in The Seattle Times, “the greatest threats facing the world today are not Soviet bombers but major environmental changes. The earlier we learn of such threats, the better our chances of mitigating their damage.” Among the examples he gives are climate change, the El Nino cycle, tsunamis and invasive species. In the Cold War, Americans accepted the need for “distant early warning,” investing huge amounts of money in the DEW Line to detect incoming nuclear bombers or missiles.

To those who argue that the private sector should take over many of the environmental early warning programs run by such agencies as NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Science Foundation, Hayes counters that “information produced by such research is, by its very nature, a ‘public good’. It benefits everyone, and it is most valuable when it is universally distributed. Hence, little, if any, distant early warning research will ever be conducted and disseminated by the private sector.”

Ironically, but again not accidentally, the American Cyclops has ordered major cuts in the budgets of basic environmental monitoring and research programs at NASA, NOAA and the NSF. It’s almost as if some giants prefer to run blind. It may be said that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king, but after my recent world tour I believe that the American Cyclops is handing the new century to others.

Thursday, June 09, 2005

MUSEUM OF FLIGHT

Took the opportunity on my way out to the airport to drop off for a couple of hours at Seattle’s Museum of Flight (www.museumofflight.org), which includes the (currently under refurbishment) Red Barn in which the Boeing Company started in 1916. Probably 20 years since I was last there and was as impressed as last time. It may not be politically correct, but I still find many of the aircraft of the 1930s and 1940s really beautiful – and the collection includes such favourites as a (in this case Goodyear) gull-wing Super Corsair, a twin-boom Lockheed P-38 Lightning, a North American P-51 Mustang and a Supermarine Spitfire Mark IX. But the most spectacular of all the planes in the museum has to be the Lockheed SR-71 ‘Blackbird’ (www.sr-71.org). This air-breathing monster set air speed records that remain unbroken after more than 25 years.

Foreground, the pedal-powered MacReady Gossamer Albatross II

Fokker D-VIII monoplane, introduced too late into WWI to make a difference

Nose-to-nose: Supermarine Spitfire and Messerschmitt Bf-109

Super Corsair, late WWII variant

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

A DAY IN SEATTLE

Yesterday, a reasonably energetic session on CSR trends with Microsoft (www.microsoft.com), today a series of sessions with Starbucks (www.starbucks.com), starting with their new CEO, Jim Donald – one of the most impressive CEOs I have yet met. After our meeting, Mark (Lee) and I were invited to observe one of the company’s open forums, in which Jim and Howard Schultz (now Chairman) opened themselves up for an hour to maybe a couple of hundred Starbucks ‘partners’. High touch, highly responsive, and a good deal of humour – usually a good signal. Then a very productive session with several Starbucks people in relation to the piece I am doing for California Management Review on blended value, with Jed Emerson and Seb Beloe.

Early in the afternoon Mark did a presentation for some of the Starbucks team on our benchmark analysis of their latest CSR report. They score pretty well, appearing in our 2004 Top 50 ratings, but much of the good stuff they are doing isn’t public knowledge. My impression of Starbucks improves considerably during the day, though it will be fascinating to see how the company copes in the coming years with the inevitable shock waves created by its plans to grow from around 9,000 stores today to a targeted 30,000 outlets – or even 50,000, as some hope.

Later in the day, after Mark has flown back to San Francisco, I have dinner with Denis Hayes, President of the Bullitt Foundation (www.bullitt.org) and co-founder in 1970 of Earth Day (www.earthday.net). I first met Denis in 1981, when he was Director of the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI), just as President Reagan started to undermine many of the institutions that had been spawned by the Earth Day movement. I was researching my book on renewables, Sun Traps (Pelican 1985). Had subsequently caught up with him in Palo Alto in the run-up to Earth Day 1990 and, later, in Seattle after he took on the Bullitt job. Wonderful chance to catch up with one of the godfathers of modern environmentalism.

Over the weekend, had been handed a bunch of press articles by my cousin Charlotte Turner, on top of which I found a piece written by Denis for the Seattle Times. In it he argued that in the same way that the US invested in the DEW Line, to provide “distant early warning” of nuclear attack during the Cold War, we should now be investing in early warning schemes to alert us to threats in such areas as climate change, invasive species and tsunamis. Conversely, the Bush Administration is currently running down funding for such key institutions as NASA (www.nasa.gov), NOAA (www.noaa.gov) and the National Science Foundation (www.nsf.gov).

Howard Schultz (centre left), Jim Donald (right)

Monday, June 06, 2005

FLIGHT SERGEANT BERRY RESURFACES

Something I had always hoped to be able to do was to thank the family of Flight Sergeant Fred Berry, who saved my father’s life during the Battle of Britain (http://johnelkington.com/archive/inf-people-father.htm), sadly being shot down himself and killed shortly afterwards, on 1 September 1940. I had also posted photos of Berry on my blog on 6 February 2004, but we had failed to track the family down. So I was thrilled today when Berry’s granddaughter got in touch by e-mail, having come across this website and my reference to how her family tree interconnected with mine all those years ago. Given that today marks the 61st anniversary of D-Day, it’s one more reminder – alongside the constant B17 fly-pasts outside my Edgewater window – of how much we owe to the ‘Greatest Generation’.

[NOTE POSTED ON 25-08-2014: Some years later, she, her mother and my father would meet. It turned out that Fred Berry’s wife never mentioned his name after he was killed, so his daughter and granddaughter had no idea of his exploits until they came across the accounts on this blog.]

Sunday, June 05, 2005

EXPERIENCE MUSIC PROJECT

Back from Vashon Island, and with rain threatening, I walk from the Edgewater Hotel to the Space Needle, in search of Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project (EMP: www.emplive.com). As I go, a B17 flies overhead (www.museumofflight.org/collections/craftdisplay.html?ID=23), a reminder of ‘Rosie the Riveter’ (www.rosietheriveter.org), D-Day (whose anniversary it is) and the huge contribution Boeing and Seattle made to the ultimate victory in WWII. Various of the people we have known in the Seattle area have been involved with Boeing, my cousin Hollister Sprague – who died in 1986 – as Mr Boeing’s lawyer, others as designers, engineers, photographers. (And as I type this up in the fading light, around 20.00, the B17 drones past again.)

As I twist and turn on my way to the Space Needle, I catch glimpses of Seattle’s port installations, with the giant gantry cranes towering like herds of metallic orange brontosauri. Musing that George Lukas was inspired by such cranes to produce his giant, lumbering white battle monsters in Star Wars, I shortly afterwards find myself standing behind Darth Vader, or at least a cutout version, inside the Science Fiction Museum.

Maybe it is my mood, but the EMP experience is flat, tacky and commercial. I was here in October 2000 for the ‘Digital Dividends’ conference (www.digitaldividend.org), shortly after the EMP opened in June of that year, and wasn’t hugely impressed then, either. The Beatlemania show, still advertised on the EMP website, has gone. Most of the displays strike me as second rate, a bit like an end-of-the-pier show, and the unbelievable electricity of performers like Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan – at least in the context of their times – is hard to detect. Ironically, I walk past a stall where Dylan, in later life, is explaining on video how dramatic the Sixties had been. You’d hardly guess it from the EMP version. You see clips of the civil rights marches, but the whole thing feels like History rather than an immersion in the era.

The Frank Gehry building in which the EMP and the Science Fiction Museum are housed is a real Curate’s Egg, good in parts, but somehow less than the sum of its parts. But every so often there is a bit of detailing that catches the eye, like penultimate last photo in this series. The last photo, at least for me, raises the question of how we could do the same list of things – jam, touch, learn, play – for sustainability that EMP aspires to (but, I think largely fails to do) for rock’n’roll.

B17 over Elliott Bay

Herds of metallic brontosauri

Darth Vader’s dark side

Bob Dylan and guitar geyser

Dylan, Joan Baez and Tide of Conformity

Civil rights marchers

Jimi Hendrix

Frank Gehry’s undulations and tree

This works for me

How do we do this for sustainability?

FOOLHARDY KILLDEER

Breakfast this morning with close neighbours of the Turners – and good friends of ours from years back. Blake shows me where a pair of killdeer (www.nhptv.org/natureworks/killdeer.htm) have nested among the stones and logs on the foreshore. So vulnerable are they that his mother, Carol, has bought a water cannon of sorts to ward off predators like crows. Killdeer are precocious, able to run around amazingly soon after they break out of the egg, but I’m not sure I rate this pair’s chances of successfully raising a brood at all high. Later, Blake drives me back to Seattle, via one of the ferries visible in the background of the crow picture.

Metal version of one of the predators

Carol and Blake, mother and son

It’s the idea that counts

Saturday, June 04, 2005

OTTER AT WORK

Have always loved Ring of Bright Water and the like, so am partial to otters – though I think I have only seen them in the wild – once – in Scotland. This afternoon, as Clark and I watched the water, what he described as a river otter pretended to be the Loch Ness Monster a little way out from the beach. This was quite a large animal, with a long tail that would follow him down into the depths like a conger eel. Later on, I walked the short distance down to the beach to take a photo of the house – and surprised the same animal right by the jetty. He strolled to the water and swam away, repeatedly looking back over his shoulder, probably signalling his displeasure at being disturbed in his toilet.

PUGET SOUND

Am staying with cousins – Charlotte and Clark Turner – in their beachside house on Vashon Island, on Puget Sound. We have a delightfully extended lunch with Chuck and Jeanne Branson, also cousins, who live across the water, their son David and his partner, Ruth. The Turner house has outlandishly wonderful views of the Sound and I can’t stop taking photographs, despite remembering the architect Moshe Safdie saying he threw his camera away because he ended up looking at everything through a rectangular frame.

SOY BEAN POWERED

Walking down the Fontleroy Ferry Dock, to catch the ferry to Vashon Island, I was truck by the large message across the bridge of the vessel – declaring that it to be soybean-powered. Inside, posters informed passengers that this was in aid of reducing greenhouse emissions. But soybeans aren’t an unadulterated Good Thing for environmentalists. Quite apart from the GM issue which has disrupted the soybean trade to the EU, at the WWF conference in Vancouver last week they showed satellite photographs of Amazonia – with peculiarly patterned bites being taken out of the rainforest by new soybean farms. Apparently much of the production goes to feed livestock, used to satisfy the growing appetite for meat in Asia.

THE BRITISH INVASION

The Edgewater Hotel

Even in its revamped state, The Edgewater Hotel – where I am staying in Seattle – has struck me as a little odd. It juts out into the sea, atop one of the old piers, but its decor is like something from Twin Peaks. That said, had breakfast there this morning with Mark and Valerie Lee (he co-directs SustainAbility’s US business) and Maria Eitel of the Nike Foundation (http://www.nike.com/nikebiz/nikefoundation/home.jhtml) – and Maria told me something that made me feel slightly differently about it all. Apparently The Beatles stayed here in the Sixties, during ‘The British Invasion’, and their fans took to the waters around the hotel in a flotilla of small boats – or even tried to swim in the chilly waters of Elliott Bay. Checked: it was 1964 – and the nearby Experience Music Project ran an exhibition last year to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of America’s descent into Beatlemania (http://www.edgewaterfabfouroh.com). Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end.

Maria and Mark

Friday, June 03, 2005

ROOM WITH A VIEW

My room on the Seattle waterfront looks out both onto an endless parade of ships and boats plying in and out of the harbour – and onto the take-off and landing lanes for Seattle airports. Looming in the foreground, a huge cruise liner. When Mark and I first see it this afternoon, I comment that it reminds me of the vast ships that I have seen docking and loading in Freemantle, Australia. They carry live sheep for slaughter in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries. The smell – indeed the insult to all the senses – was beyond words.

In the midst of it all, late this afternoon, a roiling in the waters and something animate surfaces briefly. With my normal glasses still somewhere in Beijing – and new ones being constructed somewhere a continent or two away – I can’t make out what this life-form is. But there’s reasurrance in the mystery.

Docked

RATS

Fly down to Seattle in time for Mark Lee and I to have lunch with Chip Giller, founder and President of Grist (http://www.grist.org/about/). Then across to the hotel to drop bags and out with Mark to have a beer downtown and discuss future plans. As we leave the hotel, we pass a protest by plumbers and pipelayers, featuring a display of rats, one of which (not shown here) is the size of a small T. rex.

TBL IN BC AND OZ

My visit this week to British Columbia has persuaded me that there is still a great deal of life in the old triple bottom line concept – indeed, it seems that in many places it is only just beginning to ‘break’. And this week I was also notified by CSIRO of the launch of Australia’s first set of TBL accounts.

The island continent’s first triple bottom line account at a whole-economy level offers a full life cycle analysis of each of 135 economic sectors using ten macro-indicators. The financial indicators are profits, export propensity and import penetration. The social indicators are employment, income and government revenue (taxation). The environmental indicators are greenhouse emissions, energy use, water use and land disturbance. These macro-indicators are expressed as intensities per one dollar of final demand.

The report highlights the low export performance of the services sectors, relatively good outcomes for basic mining, the many challenges faced by domestic manufacturing in the face of globalisation, and the resource intensity of food and fibre industries. While one dollar might look much the same as another, where it is spent, can have vastly different outcomes for social and environmental issues.

The work is based on the integration of the financial input-output tables in the Australian national accounts with key social and environmental indicators. Both a summary and the full report in four volumes can be accessed at http://www.cse.csiro.au/research/balancingact/

Thursday, June 02, 2005

WHISTLER

As something of a reptile, I don’t like getting up early, so a 05.00 start to today wasn’t particularly welcome – except that there was already light in my eyrie-like, glass-walled 17th floor room. Picked up at 06.00 by Linda Coady (Vice-President for Sustainability, 2010 Winter Olympics) and Coro Strandberg, we drive north towards Whistler, where the Games will be held (http://www.tourismwhistler.com/about/2010_wintergames.asp).

Also with us: Jon O’Riordan, formerly Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Sustainable Resource Management in the British Columbia Provincial Government. It’s the first time we have met, though he is the twin brother of someone I have known for decades, Professor Tim O’Riordan of the University of East Anglia, who is also a member of SustainAbility’s Faculty – like Linda and Coro.

When we get to Whistler, we have a wonderful session with the Mayor of the town, Hugh O’Reilly, and some of the key people from the 2010 Winter Olympics team. Interesting to live in London, which is bidding for the 2012 Olympics, and to have visited in quick succession both Beijing (which is hosting the 2008 games) and now Whistler. Most sports leave me cold, but am increasingly interested in the potential of major sports events to either create positive economic, social and environmental regeneration or, at worst, to leave a trail of white elephants in their wake.

After a snatched sandwich lunch, I do a public lecture. Then back into the van and off south for several commitments in Vancouver, notably a public lecture which I do at the Robson Square Media Center. Capacity audience, Linda chairs and a most enjoyable evening. Then film a sequence for a couple of people who had heard me on the CBC programme a couple of days back and are making a film on idleness and productivity. By the time I get back to the hotel, a life of idleness is beginning to seem quite appealing.

Vancouver dawn

Whistler

Homeward bound: Elizabeth Bowker at wheel

Blue blur

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

ANOTHER DAY IN VANCOUVER

Started off day with a media interview, then my keynote at the WWF conference on ‘Mobilizing Millions’, followed by energetic discussion session, then lunch with Jorgen Randers (one of the authors of The Limits to Growth), then an afternoon discussion panel, then a wine and cheese discusion with around 40 people at the amazing studio home of Joel and Dana Solomon. He is a sustainability-focused venture capitalist involved in e.g. the Tides Foundation (www.tidescanada.org), the Endswell Foundation (www.endswell.org) and Renewal Partners (www.renewalpartners.com).

Among many other interesting people I met today were Dr Claude Martin, the outgoing Director-General of WWF International; Chief Eleazar Anyaoku, President of WWF International and Chair of NEPAD; WWF-UK Chairman Christopher Ward, who it turns out was responsible for the section in the Daily Mirror in 1961 which triggered my first fund-raising venture, for the fledgling WWF launched that year; Monte Hummel, President Emeritus of WWF Canada; Mark Achbar, a producer of the film The Corporation; Tzeporah Berman, Program Director of Forest Ethics (www.forestethics.org); and Gregor Robertson of Happy Planet Foods (www.happyplanet.com), now in political office here.

Then – having somewhat regretfully handed back my complimentary tickets for the Barenaked Ladies concert this evening, I went off with Coro Strandberg to a dinner with a dozen or so people from business in the Vancouver area. Discussion whether a sustainability cluster could be developed in Vancouver or the wider British Columbia area. Dining room overlooked Vancouver’s famous steam clock. Inside the room a mouse was slowly dying, presumably poisoned. Encouraging …

Like so many things in my life, blog entries blur the boundaries between the personal and the professional. As explained on the Home Page, the website and the blog are part platform for ongoing projects, part autobiography, and part accountability mechanism.

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About

John Elkington is a world authority on corporate responsibility and sustainable development. He is currently Founding Partner and Executive Chairman of Volans, a future-focused business working at the intersection of the sustainability, entrepreneurship and innovation movements.